Dead in a Mumbai Minute

Dead in a Mumbai Minute
Author: Madhumita Bhattacharyya
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2014-09-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1447288319

As a private detective in Calcutta she had impressed maverick security expert Shayak Gupta with her sleuthing skills, leading to a new job with his firm Titanium. Now in Mumbai, Reema is given the case of the year - the murder of Ashutosh Dhingre, former assistant to fading Bollywood superstar Kimaaya Kapoor. The location of the crime is Kimaaya's private island. The suspects - her house guests, and Kimaaya herself! Reema learns of Kimaaya's prior relationship with Shayak, and can't help but think it is a conflict of interest. Equally puzzling is Shayak's repeated absence. And what of the continuing attraction simmering between her and her secretive boss? Despite the state-of-the-art facilities at Titanium, Reema is soon back to her own devices - which sometimes involves cooking up something for a spot of culinary meditation - to get to the bottom of a crime that points to a deep and sinister plot. As the body count increases, can Reema crack the case before more blood is spilled?

Murder in a Minute

Murder in a Minute
Author: Shouvik Bhattacharya
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2017-12-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9386643782

When a young woman is found lifeless in a pool of her own blood, everyone is convinced that it is her college sweetheart who murdered her. The victim's step-brothers, Rishabh and Arya,embark on a journey to unearth the truth, a journey riddled with fallacies and conspiracies, planted intentionally. What connection is there between a missing blue envelope, a misplaced sweater and stray footprints in a room. Could those people they thought they knew so well be hiding dark secrets about their past? Or did their dead sister have more to hide than they imagined?

The Masala Murder

The Masala Murder
Author: Madhumita Bhattacharyya
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1447241169

Reema Ray, private investigator and food writer. She didn't set out to become Calcutta's expert in infidelity cases, but that is where her detective agency has taken her. When the deceit gets too much, she finds a welcome distraction and a means to pay the bills by becoming a food critic for a magazine. And since she once dreamed of becoming a pastry chef, she doesn't mind much, does she? But what really turns her on is solving a juicy mystery. Her worlds collide when a gourmet provisions supplier she had once profiled ends up dead under suspicious circumstances. She might be rusty, but her food-obscured nose can still sniff out a murder, and she decides to launch her own investigation. Then her ex-boyfriend shows up at her doorstep when he finds himself being treated as prime suspect in the kidnapping of his own wife! Suddenly, Reema is handling not one but two cases. With no access to official evidence, she relies on the meddling group of do-gooders she has dubbed the Calcutta Crime-Fighter's Club. If all this wasn't trouble enough, the alluring Shayak Gupta turns up around every corner, and while she can't seem to resist him, she doesn't believe a word he says either. This first Reema Ray mystery follows a comical ride through Calcutta as Reema comes to terms with her feelings about the men in her life while whipping up delicious meals and being beset by criminals and the police alike!

Dirty Women

Dirty Women
Author: Madhumitta Bhattacharyya
Publisher: Roli Books Private Limited
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-07-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 8186939911

Madhumita Bhattacharyya is the author of four crime thrillers. The Reema Ray series – The Masala Murder; Dead in a Mumbai Minute; Goa Undercover; and Murder at the Temple. Prior to her fiction career, she was a journalist at The Telegraph Kolkata. She lives in Bangalore with her husband, daughter, and their dog.

The Heart Is a Shifting Sea

The Heart Is a Shifting Sea
Author: Elizabeth Flock
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0062456504

Winner of the Silver Nautilus Award for Journalism & Investigative Reporting "A book that truly is impossible to put down.”—Washington Post "This remarkable debut is so deeply reported, elegantly written, and profoundly transporting that it reads like a novel you can’t put down. It’s both a nuanced and intimate evocation of Indian culture, and a provocative and exciting meditation on marriage itself."—Katie Roiphe, author of The Violet Hour In the vein of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, an intimate, deeply reported and revelatory examination of love, marriage, and the state of modern India—as witnessed through the lives of three very different couples in today’s Mumbai. In twenty-first-century India, tradition is colliding with Western culture, a clash that touches the lives of everyday Indians from the wealthiest to the poorest. While ethnicity, class, and religion are influencing the nation’s development, so too are pop culture and technology—an uneasy fusion whose impact is most evident in the institution of marriage. The Heart Is a Shifting Sea introduces three couples whose relationships illuminate these sweeping cultural shifts in dramatic ways: Veer and Maya, a forward-thinking professional couple whose union is tested by Maya’s desire for independence; Shahzad and Sabeena, whose desperation for a child becomes entwined with the changing face of Islam; and Ashok and Parvati, whose arranged marriage, made possible by an online matchmaker, blossoms into true love. Though these three middle-class couples are at different stages in their lives and come from diverse religious backgrounds, their stories build on one another to present a layered, nuanced, and fascinating mosaic of the universal challenges, possibilities, and promise of matrimony in its present state. Elizabeth Flock has observed the evolving state of India from inside Mumbai, its largest metropolis. She spent close to a decade getting to know these couples—listening to their stories and living in their homes, where she was privy to countless moments of marital joy, inevitable frustration, dramatic upheaval, and whispered confessions and secrets. The result is a phenomenal feat of reportage that is both an enthralling portrait of a nation in the midst of transition and an unforgettable look at the universal mysteries of love and marriage that connect us all.

Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
Author: Wajahat Ali
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393867986

“Go back to where you came from, you terrorist!” This is just one of the many warm, lovely, and helpful tips that Wajahat Ali and other children of immigrants receive on a daily basis. Go back where, exactly? Fremont, California, where he grew up, but is now an unaffordable place to live? Or Pakistan, the country his parents left behind a half-century ago? Growing up living the suburban American dream, young Wajahat devoured comic books (devoid of brown superheroes) and fielded well-intentioned advice from uncles and aunties. (“Become a doctor!”) He had turmeric stains under his fingernails, was accident-prone, suffered from OCD, and wore Husky pants, but he was as American as his neighbors, with roots all over the world. Then, while Ali was studying at University of California, Berkeley, 9/11 happened. Muslims replaced communists as America’s enemy #1, and he became an accidental spokesman and ambassador of all ordinary, unthreatening things Muslim-y. Now a middle-aged dad, Ali has become one of the foremost and funniest public intellectuals in America. In Go Back to Where You Came From, he tackles the dangers of Islamophobia, white supremacy, and chocolate hummus, peppering personal stories with astute insights into national security, immigration, and pop culture. In this refreshingly bold, hopeful, and uproarious memoir, Ali offers indispensable lessons for cultivating a more compassionate, inclusive, and delicious America.

Death under the Deodars

Death under the Deodars
Author: Ruskin Bond
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 88
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 938599039X

‘Colonel Bakshi burst in, looking very agitated. “Something’s happened to Mrs Basu,” he said. “She’s lying outside in a fl ower bed. I think she’s dead . . .”’ In this marvellous collection of thrilling new stories set in the Mussoorie of a bygone era, Ruskin Bond recounts the deliciously sinister cases of a murdered priest, an adulterous couple, a man who is born evil, and a body in the box-bed, not to forget the strange happenings involving arsenic in the post, strychnine in the cognac, a mysterious black dog, and the Daryaganj strangler. As the elderly Miss Ripley-Bean, her Tibetan terrier, Fluff, the hotel pianist, Mr Lobo, and the owner of the Royal, Nandu, mull over these curious incidents, the reader will be enthralled and delighted—until the very end.

Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre

Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre
Author: Erin Hurt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351606964

Scholars and readers alike need little help identifying the infamous Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. While it is no stretch to say that these fictional characters are the most recognizable within the chic lit genre, there are certainly many others that have helped define this body of work. While previous research has focused primarily on white American chick lit, Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre, takes a wider look at the genre, by exploring chick lit novels featuring protagonists from a variety of ethnic backgrounds set both within and outside of the US.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Author: Katherine Boo
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-02-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0679643958

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY “Inspiring . . . extraordinary . . . [Katherine Boo] shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care.”—People “A tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece.”—Judges, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today • New York • The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • Newsday In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi’s “most-everything girl,” might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds—and into the hearts of families impossible to forget. WINNER OF: The PEN Nonfiction Award • The Los Angeles Times Book Prize • The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award • The New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • The Boston Globe • The Economist • Financial Times • Foreign Policy • The Seattle Times • The Nation • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Denver Post • Minneapolis Star Tribune • The Week • Kansas City Star • Slate • Publishers Weekly

Shantaram

Shantaram
Author: Gregory David Roberts
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 945
Release: 2004-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429908270

Based on his own extraordinary life, Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram is a mesmerizing novel about a man on the run who becomes entangled within the underworld of contemporary Bombay—the basis for the Apple + TV series starring Charlie Hunnam. “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.” An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere. As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city’s poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power. Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas—this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart.