Picador India
Showing all 20 books
Three young men from very different backgrounds come together in a journey from India to England, where they hope to begin something new. To support their families, where they can, to build their future, to show their worth, to escape the past. They have almost no idea of what awaits them.
In a dilapidated shared house in Sheffield, Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his life in Bihar. Avtar has a secret that binds him to the ...
This is the gripping story of India's democracy in the early 21st century. The ninth LokSabha election of November 1989 marked the beginning of a new political era and since then the nation's political landscape has been dramatically transformed by the rise of regional parties and leaders. Sumantra Bose illuminates the roots, significance and challenges of this bottom up federalization driven by the will of the people and the transition to a de-centered ...
Fierce ,frank and courageous, this is the riveting narrative of the Pink Gang's work in freeing a young girl unlawfully abused and imprisoned at the behest of a local politician. Fontanella -Khan explores the origins and tactics of this sisterhood with a senstivity that takes into account political manoeuvring, police drama, grassroots organizing and personal history. Pink Sari Revolution is a compelling tale.
A twenty-six-year-old Indian journalist decides to give up his job and travel to a country where he can ‘escape the deadness of his life’.So he arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerising beauty. From the beautiful, decaying wooden houses of Georgetown, through coastal sugarcane plantations, to the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond-hunters, he is absorbed by the fantastic possibilities of this place where the ...
Section 1. Lakhani .Section 2. Siraj.
Aatish Taseer’s much-awaited first novel, The Temple-Goers, explores the tensions around religion and class in a rapidly changing India. In this exclusive extract, he evokes, with comic flair, the world of Delhi’s power dinner. Some guests seem familiar enough to set off a guessing game..."
AL Basham’s The Wonder that was Indian is a brilliant early history of one of the oldest civilizations. When it was first published in the United Kingdom in 1954, it became an instant hit, as it would in the United States a few years later. Since then it has consistently found an avid readership all over the world, been translated into many languages, and has educated and entertained generations of general readers, serious students and travelers to India. This ...
Born against a background of privation and civil war, divided along lines of caste, class, language and religion, independent India emerged, somehow, as a united and democratic country. This remarkable book tells the full story-the pain and the struggle, the humiliations and the glories-of the world's largest and least likely democracy. While India is sometimes the most exasperating country in the world, it is also the most interesting. ...
My days is the only memoir from R K Narayan, one of the twentieth century's most important writers in the English language. In the wry and truthful style that has made him famous, R K Narayan shares his life story, beginning in his grand mother's garden in Madras with a ferocious pet peacock. As a young boy with no interest in school he trains grasshoppers and scouts and then, against the advice of all, especially his commanding headmaster father, the ...
India has not seen a politician quite like Laloo Yadav. A mesmerizing bundle of odds –hero to some, villain to others, a self-fashioned champion of the underdog and yet more imperious than then the most well-heeled feudal. Charming and ruthless by turns, Laloo Yadav has repeatedly defied predictions of doom. He is not finished still with the business of leaving his imprint on politics and society. Here, for the first time, is the fascinating story of Laloo ...
The Brainfever Bird is an exquisite love story, a tale of international intrigue and biological weapons, a literary thriller bursting with life, illusion and wonder. Lev is a man who has come down in the world. Once a biological weapons scientist, he is now a chauffeur in 'that new Russia where physicists wash windows and engineers drive trams'. So he decides to take his lethal knowledge abroad; to offer his services to a foreign government. He goes to India - ...
A startling, original and gripping book about the most human kind of history, done with a novelist's eye. It is the narrative about the New world, Empire, African slavery and Revolution. In this brilliant and thought provoking book V S Naipaul narrates two inked themes: the grinding down of aborigines during he long rivalries of the foolish El Dorado quest; and then two hundred years later, in the man made wilderness, the man made horror of the new slave colony. ...
A sparkling collection of short stories by some of Britain's top Asian writers-Rukhsana Ahmad, Debjani Chatterjee, Farrukh Dhondy, Jamila Gavin, Ramesh Gunesekera, Aamer Hussein, Preethi Nair, Shyama Perera, Bali Rai an Adam Zameenzad.From 1970s London to the heady peaks of the Himalayas, this exciting collection pulls you into the lives of tee very different teenagers, each with a story to tell. Meet Asha through her hilarious diary account of teenage life and ...
Award-winning US writer Nell Freudenberger’s highly anticipated debut collection. Lucky Girls is a collection of five stories, set in India and South-East Asia, narrated by young women who find themselves face to face with the compelling circumstances of adult love. Living in unfamiliar places, according to new and often frightening rules, these characters become vulnerable in unexpected ways-and learn, as a result, to articulate the romantic attraction to ...
Amit Chaudhuri’s stories range across the astonishing face of the modern Indian subcontinent. From a divorcee about to enter into an arranged marriage to a teenaged poet who develops a relationship with a lonely widower, from singing teachers to housewives to white-collar businessmen, Chaudhuri deftly explores the juxtaposition of the new and old worlds in his native India. Here are stories as sweet and humane as they are incisive and revealing.
The Past is a Cruel Country; it never renounces its claim on you. Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds a chance to start his life all over again when arrives in England to study. But to do that he must relive his entire past, unravel a thread of narrative he can only now bring himself to read. Above all, he has to make sense of his relationship with his mother- scarred, abusive, all-consuming.But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is ...
A film director asks Binod, who is a journalist in Bombay, to produce a portrait of a murdered girl, a poet killed by a politician by whom she is pregnant. The director wants a script about small towns desire, compromise and intrigue. Probably he wants masala. Subtle and articulate, his sensibility shaped by the classic films of a high-minded and austere boyhood, Binod undertakes to draught a Bollywood story. Unlike Binod is his cousin Rabinder, in Hajipur jail ...
February 2002, A helpless nation watches as the city of Ahmedabad in India is rocked by religious violence. Before sunrise the next day, more than a hundred Muslim men, women and children will be killed, most of them burnt alive. Above the smoke and flames, the dead decide to intervene. So begins Fireproof, Raj Kamal Jha’s mesmerizing new novel, in which the murdered whisper from footnotes and photographs. At the heart of the novel is its narrator Jay – a man ...