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'The true university of these days is a collection of books' - Thomas Carlyle

The Vodafone Crossword Book Award Winners - 2007

The Last Mughal
Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last Mughal Emperor, was a mystic, a talented poet, and a skilled calligrapher, who, though deprived of real political power by the East India Company, succeeded in creating a court of great brilliance, and presided over one of the great cultural renaissances of Indian history. In 1857 it was Zafar's blessing to a rebellion among the Company's own Indian troops that transformed an army mutiny into the largest uprising the British Empire ever had to face.

The Last Mughal is a portrait of the dazzling Delhi Zafar personified, and the story of the last days of the great Mughal capital and its final destruction in the catastrophe of 1857. Shaped from groundbreaking material, William Dalrymple's powerful retelling of this fateful course of events is an extraordinary revisionist work with clear contemporary echoes. It is the first account to present the Indian perspective on the siege, and has at its heart the stories of the forgotten individuals tragically caught up in one of the bloodiest upheavals in history.

A Girl and a River
It is the 1930s and the fire of the freedom movement from distant Bengal and Delhi is warming the languid bones of the small town in Mysore, where Kaveri and Setu grow up. Theirs is a liberal, prosperous household and the family takes its privileges for granted. Mylaraiah, their father, believes that they are twice protected from such delusions as 'swaraj'-once by the British and then by the Maharaja. While Setu absorbs their father's unquestioning veneration of the British, Kaveri, profoundly affected by Mahatma Gandhi's visit to their town, comes to recognize their attempts to be 'more English than the English' as rather shameful. In an attempt to follow her heart and take charge of her own future, Kaveri defies her father and participates in the Quit India march organized by Shyam, the hot-headed revolutionary she is attracted to. Angered and jealous, and loyal to his father, Setu is forced into betraying his sister. The small town is shaken into life quite brutally when it faces a police firing for the first time in its history. But Kaveri is safe and home, or so Setu thinks . . .

Fifty years later, Setu's daughter tries to unravel the circumstances of her uneasy upbringing, of the grit-in-the-eye feeling to her childhood; understand her cold father, her self-effacing mother and their refusal to talk about their past. Two books and a letter found in a tea tin in the attic lead her to Kaveri and it is Kaveri, whose fate remains shrouded in mystery, who has the answer to her questions. But even with all the pieces of the jigsaw in hand, the picture eludes her. She is forced to come to terms with the insidiousness of family bonds as she realizes that the truth, if it at all exists, is made of elisions and imperfections.

Govardhan's Travels: A novel
Halfway through his famous play on injustice, Andher Nagari Choupat Raja, Bharatendu Harishchandra stops: What is the duty of a writer-to depict reality as it exists or to project what it should actually be? Unable to decide, Bharatendu abandons the play and releases Govardhan, the main character who is unjustly condemned to death, from drama to real life.

The noose still hangs over Govardhan's head as he walks out of prison as a representative of all those who are victims of the ruthlessness and absurdity of justice. He questions everyone he encounters and raises a storm which gains momentum as he journeys through space and time. The lines between fact and fiction blur as a host of people from mythology, history and literature join him, some asking questions, like him, and others opposing them.

As we follow Govardhan's meanderings, we realize that his journey will never end, for with the passage of time he will find more places to visit and more people to meet, even as the ever-present noose tightens around his neck. Ultimately, there can be no escape for the Govardhans of this world.

Anand's imaginative recreation of Govardhan's life after his release from prison maintains the farcical nature of Bharatendu's work, although it moves away from the comfortable ending of Andher Nagari Choupat Raja. It provides a terrifying portrait of the cruelty and irrationality of the world which we contend as civilized.

Chowringhee
Set in 1950s Calcutta, Chowringhee is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta's largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Shankar, the newest recruit, recounts the stories of several people whose lives come together in the suites, restaurants, bar and backrooms of the hotel. As both observer and participant in the events, he inadvertently peels off the layers of everyday existence to expose the seamy underbelly of unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, callous manipulation and unbidden tragedy. What unfolds is not just the story of individual lives but also the incredible chronicle of a metropolis.

Written by best-selling Bengali author Sankar, Chowringhee was published as a novel in 1962. Predating Arthur Hailey's Hotel by three years, it became an instant hit, spawning translations in major Indian languages, a film and a play. Its larger-than-life characters-the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose, the tragic hostess Karabi Guha, among others-soon attained cult status. With its thinly veiled accounts of the private lives of real-life celebrities, and its sympathetic narrative seamlessly weaving the past and the present, it immediately established itself as a popular classic. Available for the first time in English, Chowringhee is as much a dirge as it is homage to a city and its people

The Music Room
The Music Room is the story of Namita and her teacher; of the charismatic Alladiya Khan; and of the foul-mouthed and bewitching Kesarbai. At its heart is Dhondutai, shy, diffident yet full of determination. Beautifully written, full of anecdotes, gossip and legend, it is a stunning book, a must read for every musician and music lover

The Hutch Crossword Book Award Winners - 2006

Sacred Games
Seven years in the making, Sacred Games is an epic of exceptional richness and power. Vikram Chandra's novel draws the reader deep into the life of detective Sartaj Singh, and into the criminal underworld of Ganesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster in India.

Sartaj, one of the very few Sikhs in the Mumbai police force, is used to being identified by his turban, beard and the sharp cut of his trousers. But 'the silky Sikh' is now past forty, his marriage is over, and his career prospects are on the slide. When Sartaj gets an anonymous tip-off as to the secret hideout of the legendary boss of G-company, he's determined that he'll be the one to collect the prize.

Vikram Chandra's keenly anticipated new novel is a sprawling, magnificent story of friendship and betrayal, of terrible violence, of an astonishing modern city and its dark side. Drawing on the best of Victorian fiction, mystery novels, Bollywood movies and Chandra's years of first-hand research on the streets of Mumbai, Sacred Games reads like a potboiling page-turner but resonates with the intelligence and emotional depth of the best of literature.

'A writer who is simultaneously a master story teller and a master stylist' -Francis King, Spectator

'[Chandra has] a sureness of touch and mastery of structure that are deeply satisfying' -Shashi Tharoor, New York Times Book Review

'His prose is elegant and various. His imagination is visionary' -Lucy Hughes-Hallett, London Times.

Two Lives
Shanti Behari Seth was born on the eighth day of the eighth month in the eighth year of the twentieth century; he died two years before its close. He was brought up in India in the late years of the Raj, and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin-though he could not speak a word of German-to study medicine and dentistry. It was here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti's path first crossed that of his future wife.

Henny Gerda Caro was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a Jewish family, cultured, patriotic and intensely German. When the family decided to have Shanti as a lodger, Henny's first reaction was, 'Don't take the black man!' But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Hitler's Germany for England, just one month before the war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person she knew in the country: Shanti.

Vikram Seth has woven together their astonishing story: the war that took Shanti to North Africa, the Middle East and the battle of Monte Cassino, where his right arm was blown off; the persecution that saw Henny desperately searching for news of the mother and sister she had left behind; the love that sparked their marriage in 1951; the courage that inspired Shanti to defy his injury and set up once again in his profession; the arrival into this childless couple's lives of their great-nephew from India-the teenage student, Vikram Seth.

The result is an extraordinary tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain. Two Lives is both a history of a violent country seen through the eyes of two survivors as well as an intimate portrait of their friendship, marriage and abiding yet complex love. Part biography, part memoir, part meditation on our times, this is the true tale of two remarkable lives-a masterful telling from one of our greatest living writers.

'When a book like Two Lives is written, the world regains a little more humanity-and literature a lot more' -India Today

'Its telling is intensely personal . . . perhaps Seth's most engaging and touching work' -Hindustan Times

'It needed a Seth to write this book. Only he, with his spare, lucid prose . . . could have turned an affectionate family after-dinner story into a "big book" memoir meant to be read by many. He has proved, if proof were needed . . . that he is possibly the most "international" of India's literary success stories' -Times of India.

Kesavan' s Lamentations
Set in a steamy, politicised Kerala, Kesavan's Lamentations is an engaging witty romp through the complexities of a community, paralleled with the tangle which is a writer's mind in the midst of a book. Written as a story within a story - the story of the writer framing the story that he creates, one merging inevitably with the other - the book recreates the internal and external chaos involved in the process of Kesavan's writing, as he writes his book, Appukuttan's Lamentations. The reader is drawn into this imaginary world, charged with the energy of a cast of fascinating, eccentric characters.

In a translation which gives the book a rare vernacular texture, Kesavan's Lamentations conveys the sights and sounds, the sultry atmosphere of Kerala, with its fervent political atmosphere, and its people so distinctly shaped by the same.

In A Forest, A Deer
Thought-provoking, witty, inventive and stylish, but also deeply moving, Ambai's stories are among the finest of contemporary short fiction in Tamil. This book is a translation of her third collection of short stories, Kaattil oru maan (2000). Included in this book is also a long story, 'A movement, a folder, some tears', which is not yet part of any collection.

Ambai's intricate stories constantly reinvent the short story form, teasing and delighting the reader. They interweave lives, juxtapose the past and the present, the mythical and the contemporary, articulating the real experience of women and communicating their silences in words and images. A mix of narrative forms- letters, dispatches, journals, emails, memos and articles-adds variety.

The stories, located in Tamil Nadu and Mumbai, in Europe as well as the United States, touch upon themes of displacement, exile, and identity; the way people describe themselves and the communities to which they choose to belong. In 'Journey 2', Dinakaran defines himself narrowly as a person from Tirunelveli, who can only face the day after his bath in the river. The narrator of 'A Rose-coloured Sari' wonders about her individual self, in contrast to the artificial 'Indianness', which she sees in the Festival of India abroad.

The Inheritance of Loss
. 'Kiran Desai is a terrific writer. This book richly fulfills the promise of her first.' -Salman Rushdie

Kiran Desai's first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge's chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one New York restaurant job to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the INS, forced to consider his country's place in the world. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai's new-sprung romance with her handsome Nepali tutor and causes their lives to descend into chaos, they, too, are forced to confront their colliding interests. The nation fights itself. The cook witnesses the hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge must revisit his past, his own role in this grasping world of conflicting desires-every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal.

A novel of depth and emotion, desai's second, long-awaited novel fulfils the grand promise established by her first.

'The novel delights in polyphonic multicultural diversity subjects . . . [It] is poised ably on the contradictory terrains of East and West, poverty and wealth, the migrant and the resident' -Tribune

The Crossword Book Award Winners - 2005

Shalimar The Clown
Los Angeles, 1991. Maximilian Ophuls, one of the makers of the modern world, is knifed to death in broad daylight on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter India, slaughtered by his Kashmiri driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the Clown. The dead man is a World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability and much erotic appeal, a former United States ambassador to India, and subsequently America's counter-terrorism chief. The murder looks at first like a political assassination but turns out to be passionately personal. This is the story of Max, his killer, and his daughter - and of a fourth character, the woman who links them, whose story explains them all. The story of a deep love gone fatally wrong, destroyed by a shallow affair, it is an epic narrative that moves from California to France, England, and above all, Kashmir. At its heart is the tale of that earthly paradise of peach orchards and honey bees, of mountains and lakes, of green-eyed women and murderous men: a ruined paradise, not so much lost as smashed. Lives are uprooted, names keep changing - nothing is permanent, yet everything is connected.
Spanning the globe and darting through history, Salman Rushdie's majestic narrative captures the heart of the reader and the spirit of a troubled age.

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Maximum City
Suketu Mehta left Bombay at the age of 14. Twenty-one years later, having lived in Paris, London and New York's East Village, he returned to rediscover the only city he calls his own. The result is this stunning, brilliantly illuminating portrait of the megalopolis and its people-a book, seven years in the making, that is as vast, as diverse, as rich in experience, incident and sensation as the city itself.

Mehta approaches the life and lives of Bombay from unexpected angles. He takes us into the underworld where Muslim and Hindu gangs manage to wrest some control of the Byzantine political and commercial systems of the city. He follows the life of a bar dancer, whose childhood of poverty and abuse left her no choice but the one she made. He journeys on the famed local trains and out onto the streets and footpaths, where the essential story of Bombay is played out every day by the countless migrants who come in search of a better life. He opens windows into the inner sanctums of Bollywood and the alternative universe at its fringes. And through it all-as each individual story unfolds-we hear Mehta's own story: of the mixture of love, frustration, fascination, and intense identification he feels for and with Bombay.
Candid, impassioned, insightful, both surprisingly funny and heart-rending, Maximum City is a revelation of a complex and ever-changing world: the continent of Bombay.

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Pundits From Pakistan
A cricketing romp through Pakistan In early 2004, the Indian cricket team set out for Pakistan. Pundits describes the subsequent tour, detailing the matches, the moods, the games and the players. More than merely that, though, it is also a book about the first major sporting encounter between India and Pakistan in 15 years - a period in which the two countries had fought one war and come close to another. What emerges is a fascinating contemporary account of a beautiful game in its most crucial setting, captured through the eyes of a young Indian discovering Pakistan.

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The Heart has its Reasons
Set in the Dilly of the 1920s, this love story threatens the seams of family and passion, as Kutumb the wife gropes for the slivers of a broken marriage. Three powerful characters, three distinct voices. Krishna Sobti crafts a perfect wind cup that shields the flickering flames of love and life.

The Crossword Book Award Winners - 2004

The Hungry Tide
It is only when the Ganges approaches the Bay of Bengal that it frees itself and separates into thousands of wandering strands. The result is the Sundarbans, an immense stretch of mangrove forest, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea. There is a terrible, vengeful beauty here, a place teeming with crocodiles, snakes, sharks and man-eating tigers. This is the only place on earth where man is more often prey than predator. And it is into this terrain that an eccentric, wealthy Scotsman named Daniel Hamilton tried to create a utopian society, of all races and religions, and conquer the might of the Sundarbans.

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Astride the Wheel
The first half of the novel is set in a village in Orissa. In its second half, the reader leaves behind the claustrophobic Brahmin settlement, its caste hierarchies, trivial preoccupations and repetitive rituals to travel with Sanatan Dase to Dakhineswar, Varanasi, Vrindavan, and finally to Puri. The protagonist's outward pilgrimage coincides with a journey into an inner world of profound mystical experience.

The Crossword Book Award Winners - 2000

The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

In 1981, a horrified British public learnt that Sherlock Holmes - in a last deadly struggle with the archcriminal Professor Moriarty - had perished at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Two years later, popular demand made Conan Doyle resurrect the great detective: Holmes informs a stunned Dr Watson 'I travelled two years in Tibet.'
This is all what the world has known of Sherlock Holmes's journey to the East. Jamyang Korbu, decides to take the matter in his hands; to investigate Holmes's stay in Lhasa, Tibet. The Mandala holds the key to the mystery and reveals Holmes in a landscape so fascinating that it is difficult to resist.

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Karukku

In this unusual autobiography, a young woman, Bama, looks back on her life from a moment of personal crisis, as she leaves the religious order to which she has belonged. She recreates her childhood in her village through a series of poignant memories and reflections. Most importantly she examines the simple faith with which she grew up as a Roman Catholic and restates it in the light of her experience as a Dalit and a woman.

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Crossword Book Award Winners - 1999

An Equal Music

In An Equal Music, his first novel since A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth returns with a story both intricate and intimate, rich with music, art, humour and emotion. On one level, it is a story about love, about the love of a woman lost and found and lost again.
A chance sighting on a London bus, a letter which should never have been read, a pianist with a secret that touches the heart of her music. From a multiplicity of details, Vikram Seth once again creates a living, breathing world that enchants and grips the reader. This is also a book about music and about how the love of music can run like a passionate theme through a life.

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On The Banks of the Mayyazhi

Mayazzhi (Mahe) in the forties: a melange of native myth and legend and shimmering French elegance. Wine flows through streets where horse-drawn carriages speed by day and night. A folklore has it that souls hover as dragonflies over the Velliyan Rock in the sea.
A wave of nationalism sweeps over the town and a group of dedicated young men determined to free Mayazzhi from the French set the wheels in motion. Dasan, a promising young man, destined for a brilliant career in the French government, finds himself in the thick of the movement. The author captures the spirit of a period of transition with piquant cameos of a Mayyazhi now lost forever.

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Crossword Book Award Winner - 1998

The Everest Hotel

In the small town of Drummondganj under the shadow of the Himalayas stands the Everest, once an exclusive hotel and now a home for the unwanted, run by a small community of nuns. The owner, Jed, sometimes mountaineer and flower-hunter, ninety but still smouldering, lives on the roof from where he looks out across the cemetery at his beloved snows. Obsessed with writing the Drummondganj Book of the Dead, he sees no visitors except his neighbour and disciple, the footloose bodybuilder Brij.
The arrival of Ritu, a young botanising nun assigned to look after Jed, skews matters both on the roof and in the garden where Thapa, a retired Gurkha soldier is mali and chowkidar. But it is the entry of another newcomer, Inge, a German neo-Nazi in search of her uncle's grave that strains the equilibrium of life at the Everest.

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Shortlists-Crossword Book Award