Here are some great titles up for sale at DLF2023:
Shurjo's Clan (Iffat Nawaz)
During the hours of daylight, young Shurjomukhi's family is like any other inDhaka, going through the motions of school, work, and domesticity in a nationstill in the flush of youth. But every night, once darkness falls over theirasymmetrical house, they switch over to the Unknown world. Death does notexist in the Unknown side and the family is joined for dinner by Shurjo's freedomfighter uncles, who were martyred in the tea gardens of Sylhet at the start of the1971 Bangladesh liberation war, and her grandmother who killed herself byjumping into a well in the aftermath of 1947. These dinners are festive affairs,replete with the joy of reunion, music and stories, but underneath thecelebration, Shurjo's family is riddled with the traumas of their past: death, war,migration, separation, the inability to belong to a land, dwelling in an in-betweenspace, an eternal limbo. And when the miasmic shadow of the past inevitablyfalls on young Shurjo, the pitfalls of their dual reality is laid bare. The only wayforward is an upheaval that splits the family apart, flinging Shurjo and herparents to the other end of the world.
Imaginative and compelling, Shurjo's Clan merges magical realism with a vividhistoricity to paint an entirely contemporary portrait of how grief is inherited, howthe traumas and memories of our ancestors continue to shape those who comelong after.
Spanning decades, from the forced migration of Bengalis to East Pakistan in1947, through the 1971 liberation war, the wave of immigrants to the West in the1980s, and a final return, Iffat Nawaz's lyrical and evocative prose marks thearrival of a distinctive voice, one that unravels questions of grief, belonging,identity, and family with delightful imaginativeness and devastating insight. Withits mesmerizing balance between inexplicable otherworldliness and undeniablereality, this debut novel asks, above all, how we can honour the past without
letting its wounds destroy us.
The Bengalis: A Portrait of a Community (Sudeep Chakravarti)
The Bengalis are the third largest ethno-linguistic group in the world, after the Han Chinese and the Arabs. A quarter of a billion strong and growing, the community has produced three Nobel laureates, world-class scientists, legendary political leaders and revolutionaries, iconic movie stars and directors, and an unending stream of writers, philosophers, painters, poets and musicians of the first rank. But, bald facts aside, just who are the Bengalis? What is the community all about, stereotypically and beyond stereotype? In order to find the answers to these and related questions, the author (a Bengali born and steeped in his own culture but objective enough to give us a balanced reckoning of his fellows) delves deep into the culture, literature, history and social mores of the Bengalis. He writes with acuity about the many strengths of the community but does not flinch from showing us its weaknesses and tormented history.
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (John Lee Anderson)
Jon Lee Anderson's biography traces Che's extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the halls of power in Castro's government to his failed campaign in the Congo and assassination in the Bolivian jungle.
Anderson has had unprecedented access to the personal archives maintained by Guevara's widow and carefully guarded Cuban government documents. He has conducted extensive interviews with Che's comrades—some of whom speak here for the first time—and with the CIA men and Bolivian officers who hunted him down. Anderson broke the story of where Guevara's body was buried, which led to the exhumation and state burial of the bones. Many of the details of Che's life have long been cloaked in secrecy and intrigue. Meticulously researched and full of exclusive information, Che Guevara illuminates as never before this mythic figure who embodied the high-water mark of revolutionary communism as a force in history.
The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Amitav Ghosh)
A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg's Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh's narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh's hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.
Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg's Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.
CourtesyRun and Hide (Pankaj Mishra)
Growing up in a small railway town, Arun always dreamed of escape. His acceptance to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, enabled through great sacrifice by his low-caste parents, is seemingly his golden ticket out of a life plagued by everyday cruelties and deprivations.
At the predominantly male campus, he meets two students from similar backgrounds. Unlike Arun―scarred by his childhood, and an uneasy interloper among go-getters―they possess the sheer will and confidence to break through merciless social barriers. The alumni of IIT eventually go on to become the financial wizards of their generation, working hard and playing hard from East Hampton to Tuscany―the beneficiaries of unprecedented financial and sexual freedom. But while his friends play out Gatsby-style fantasies, Arun fails to leverage his elite education for social capital. He decides to pursue the writerly life, retreating to a small village in the Himalayas with his aging mother.
Arun's modest idyll is one day disrupted by the arrival of a young woman named Alia, who is writing an exposé of his former classmates. Alia, beautiful and sophisticated, draws Arun back to the prospering world where he must be someone else if he is to belong. When he is implicated in a terrible act of violence committed by his closest friend from IIT, Arun will have to reckon with the person he has become.
Run and Hide is Pankaj Mishra's powerful story of achieving material progress at great moral and emotional cost. It is also the story of a changing country and global order, and the inequities of class and gender that map onto our most intimate relationships.
The Mendicant Prince (Aruna Chakravarti)
In the winter of 1909, Ramendranarayan Roy, the ailing second prince of the Bhawal zamindari, proceeds to Darjeeling with his wife Bibhavati, brother-in-law Satyendranath and a retinue of officials and servants, after being advised a change of air by his physicians. Three weeks later, a telegram from Satyendranath arrives at the Bhawal estate, carrying news of the prince's demise and subsequent cremation.
Soon peculiar rumours start circulating around Bhawal and the surrounding town. Some say that the prince was poisoned, while others suspect that his body was taken to the burning ghat but not actually cremated. There are also whispers about an incestuous relationship between Bibhavati and her brother. The story takes a bewildering turn when, twelve years later, a mendicant comes to Bhawal, claiming to be the long-lost prince and the heir to the estate.
With no resolution in sight, matters reach the court, where the so-called prince and some family members face off against Bibhavati and her brother, aided by the British Court of Wards who are keen on maintaining ownership of the zamindari. The breathless legal drama that ensues will culminate in an incredible series of events, permanently altering the course of the estate's history.
Inspired by the legendary Bhawal sannyasi case and evocative in its recreation of pre-Partition Bengal, The Mendicant Prince is an intriguing tale of dual identity and the inexplicable quirks of fate.
Tomb of Sand (Geetanjali Shree)
An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention including striking up a friendship with a hijra (trans) woman confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more modern of the two. At the older woman's insistence, they travel back to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist. Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree's playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders.
(All these titles are available for purchase at the Bookworm Bangladesh stall)
