"Parthiban's Dream"

Kalki
Translated from the Tamil by Gita Rajan

A story of epic proportions spanning dynasties, Parthiban's Dream is realized on a landscape that resounds as much with heroic war cries as it is awash with the tenderness of familial and romantic love. Witness the times of the great Pallavas and Cholas, the royal intrigues and conspiracies and the exploits of the great Narasimha Verman that has inspired storytellers down the ages. A heady mix of history and legend, with Parthiban's Dream, Katha brings the inimitable Kalki for you.

Category: Young Adult/Historical Fiction

"Alma Kabutari"

Maitreyi Pushpa
Translated from the Hindi by Raji Narasimhan

The saga of Alma Kabutari does not begin with Alma herself. It has its roots in centuries of social and sexual subjugation of the kabutaris by the upper-caste kajjas. Like Chittor's Rani Padmini of yore, from whom the kabutaris are descended, the onus of breaking the vicious circle and reclaiming human status for her people falls on young Alma. The engrossing story of young Alma's evolution from victim to survivor to tenacious rebel, Alma Kabutari opens a window to the suffering and exploitation of a tribe that teeters at the very fringes of society even today, and that urgently needs our concern and understanding.

Raji Narasimhan is a well-known writer and translator who lives in New Delhi.

Category: Adult/Fiction

"Second Person Singular"

Udaya Narayana Singh

Second Person Singular is the poetic expression of the epiphanic other-view of love and life that language presents to each individual. Udaya Narayana Singh’s original Maithili poems in this translation present the strange counterpoints that one gets from an involvement with language. They bring out the dialectical texture of the silent spaces in human relationships.

Shot through with ardour for the art of poetry and an exploration of the many moods of love in an unmistakably Indian idiom, the poet’s penchant for the miniature image and the powerful word endure in this volume.

Category: Adult/Poetry

"Cut!"

Merle Kröger
Translated by Rubaica Jaliwala

When the last reel winds down in the projection room of the old cinema house, Madita Junghans, the German with Indian genes, teams up with her boyfriend Nikolaus as detective couple, Nick and Mattie, to set off on a search for Madita's biological father. Their only clue is that he is an Indian. Mattie's mother lives in a psychotic dream world. Her foster father Hinnarck is anything but talkative. Mattie and Nick soon get sucked into a deadly adventure, centred around a dark chapter of Indo-Germanic history.

A scintillating fusion of whodunit, postcolonial fable and historical romance, Cut! is a film in novel form. In her refreshingly subjective style, Merle Kröger portrays the tenous connections between reel and real life, the past and the present, and with chilling perception, depicts the clash of stark Hamburg reality with the Bollywood dream factory.

Category: Adult/Fiction

"Satyadas"

Bimal Kar
Illustrated by Neeta Gangopadhya

"What do you want?" asked Raghunath.

On a day of unseasonal rains, a stranger comes to poor Raghunath's home. He wants very little compared to what he leaves behind, and a whole year turns around before he comes back, not to claim what he left behind but to witness the loss of something far more precious.

The eternal cycle of day and night, the inseparable opposites of light and darkness and the six seasons that are spectators to every human folly, vice and virtue – Satyadas is a simple allegorical tale of changing fortunes and the exit of humane values at the advent of material well-being and prosperity.

Category: Young Adult/Fiction