Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

New York

A triptych of beautifully crafted novellas make up Anita Desai’s exquisite new book. Set in modern India, but where history still casts a long shadow, the stories move beyond the cities to places still haunted by the past, and to characters who are, each in their own way, masters of self-effacement.nbsp;

In ‘The Museum of Final Journeys’ an unnamed government official is called upon to inspect a faded mansion of forgotten treasures, each sent home by the absent, itinerant master. As he is taken through the estate, wondering whether to save these precious relics, he reaches the final – greatest – gift of all, looming out of the shadows.nbsp;
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In ‘Translator, Translated’, middle-aged Prema meets her successful publisher friend Tara at a school reunion. Tara hires her as a translator, but Prema, buoyed by her work and the sense of purpose it brings, begins deliberately to blur the line between writer and translator, and in so doing risks unravelling her desires and achievements.
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The final story is of Ravi, living hermit-like in the burnt-out shell of his family home high up in the Himalayan mountains. He cultivates not only silence and solitude but a secret hidden away in the woods, concealed from sight. When a film crew from Delhi intrude upon his seclusion, it compels him to withdraw even further until he magically and elusively disappears…
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Rich and evocative, remarkable in their clarity and sensuous in their telling, these stories remind us of the extraordinary yet delicate power of this pre-eminent writer.

The Artist of Disappearance

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Brand new; unwrapped but not listened to.

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Maryland

Vikas Swarup's spectacular debut novel opens in a jail cell in Mumbai, India, where Ram Mohammad Thomas is being held after correctly answering all twelve questions on India's biggest quiz show, Who Will Win a Billion? It is hard to believe that a poor orphan who has never read a newspaper or gone to school could win such a contest. But through a series of exhilarating tales Ram explains to his lawyer how episodes in his life gave him the answer to each question. Ram takes us on an amazing review of his own history--from the day he was found as a baby in the clothes donation box of a Delhi church to his employment by a faded Bollywood star to his adventure with a security-crazed Australian army colonel to his career as an overly creative tour guide at the Taj Mahal. Swarup's Q & A is a beguiling blend of high comedy, drama, and romance that reveals how we know what we know--not just about trivia, but about life itself. Cutting across humanity in all its squalor and glory, Vikas Swarup presents a kaleidoscopic vision of the struggle between good and evil--and what happens when one boy has no other choice in life but to survive.

Q and A (Audio Book on CD)

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#hardcover #wilbursmith #tomharper #ghostfire #india #fiction #historicalfiction

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Ohio

 

The brand new Courtney Series novel.

A brand new Courtney Series novel by bestselling author, Wilbur Smith. 

1754. Inseparable since birth and growing up in India, Theo and Connie Courtney are torn apart by the tragic death of their parents.

Theo, wracked with guilt, strikes a solitary path through life. Haunted by the spirits of lovers and family members, he is determined to atone for his mistakes. He seeks salvation in combat and conflict, joining the British in the war against the French and Indian army.

Believing herself abandoned by her brother, and abused and brutalised by a series of corrupt guardians, Connie vows never to let any man own her. Instead, she uses her beauty to manipulate her way to France, where she is welcomed into high society. But Connie once again finds herself at the mercy of vicious men, whose appetite for war and glory lead her to the frontlines of the French battlefield in North America.

As the siblings find their destinies converging once more, they realise that the vengeance and redemption they both desperately seek could cost them their lives . . .

An epic story of tragedy, loss, betrayal and courage that brings the reader deep into the seething heart of the French Indian War.

Ghost Fire

b711d644-9cca-4431-ab0e-62b5dd74fc05-1

Praba Ram

Sheela Preuitt

New Jersey

Told from a blind child's perspective, this warm and delectable picture book from India is about friendship and community in gorgeous Ladakh.

Thukpa for All

447b5607-ab6c-44ec-967d-31d45698f51e-1

K. Shivkumar

Corners show slight shelfware, no dust cover

Alabama

A Folktale from India

The lion's courtiers persuade him to try camel's meat but the results are unexpected.

The King's Choice

8d9e657a-3df1-4940-adc4-7d953fa32873-0

Michigan

With humor, intelligence, and masterly prose, Lavanya Sankaran's debut novel brilliantly captures the vitality and danger of a newly industrialized city and how it shapes the dreams and aspirations of two very different families.
 
Anand is a Bangalore success story: successful, well married, rich. At least, that's how he appears. But if his little factory is to grow, he needs land and money, and, in the New India, neither of these is easy to find.
 
Kamala, Anand's family's maid, lives perilously close to the edge of disaster. She and her clever teenage son have almost nothing, and their small hopes for self-betterment depend on the contentment of Anand's wife: a woman to whom whims come easily.
 
But Kamala's son keeps bad company, and Anand's marriage is in trouble. The murky world where crime and land and politics meet is a dangerous place for a good man, particularly one on whom the well-being of so many depends.
 
Rich with irony and compassion, Lavanya Sankaran's The Hope Factory affirms her gifts as a born storyteller with remarkable prowess, originality, and wisdom.
 
Praise for Lavanya Sankaran's The Red Carpet
 
"By the end of [the] very first story, people half a world away have been transformed into complete human beings, full of frailties and fragile self-regard, achingly sympathetic. That's why The Red Carpet reads like a revelation. . . . I recommend this book so highly!"--Carolyn See, The Washington Post
 
"Throughout these fine, articulate stories, Lavanya Sankaran brings to life the new and old social worlds of Bangalore. More important, she uses the quiet dignity of her characters to reveal what's universal in the wide rift between generations. It's an unusually elegant and nuanced portrait."--John Dalton, author of The Inverted Forest
 
"It's a pity there aren't more stories to be told in Carpet. They're so much fun."--The Dallas Morning News
 
"[An] animated debut . . . [These stories] are memorable for their subtle wit and convincing evocation of a dynamic world."--Publishers Weekly

The Hope Factory

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#mehndi #henna #tattoo #India #bodyart #Africa #MiddleEast #Design #henna-art 

The Art of Henna Body Painting

The magical art of mehndi, or henna painting, has been practiced for centuries in India, Africa, and the Middle East, and now it has finally arrived in the West. Packed with inspirational photographs of traditional and contemporary mehndi, this complete resource offers everything you need to create your own beautiful henna designs, including:

* dozens of practice exercises and sample illustrations
* a foolproof recipe for mixing the henna paste
* step-by-step instructions on how to apply your mehndi design
* insider's tips from professional mehndi artists and more!

Mehndi

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A red ink dot on base, see photos. Otherwise in perfect condition. 

A Novel

Follow the completely infuriating, utterly charming Professor Chandra as he tries to answer the biggest question of all: What makes us happy? "Professor Chandra is as acerbic and unbending a curmudgeon as one could wish to find scowling from the pages of a novel. Brilliant, pompous, and baffled by the world outside his Cambridge study, Chandra is forced on a reluctant quest to America to find himself and his family. Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss is searingly funny, uplifting, and wonderful."--Helen Simonson, New York Times bestselling author of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and The Summer Before the War Professor Chandra is an internationally renowned economist, divorced father of three (quite frankly baffling) children, recent victim of a bicycle hit-and-run--but so much more than the sum of his parts. In the moments after the accident, Professor Chandra doesn't see his life flash before his eyes but his life's work. He's just narrowly missed the Nobel Prize (again), and even though he knows he should get straight back to his pie charts, his doctor has other ideas. All this work. All this success. All this stress. It's killing him. He needs to take a break, start enjoying himself. In short, says his doctor, he should follow his bliss. Professor Chandra doesn't know it yet, but he's about to embark on the journey of a lifetime. Advance praise for Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss "There's a long tradition of trying (and failing) to describe the spiritual search and the ineffable mystery without sounding like a pretentious snob or a sappy Pollyanna. Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss manages to pull it off. The book tackles perennially difficult and deep questions with humor and humanity, beautiful writing, and a page-turning story line. I gave myself over to Professor Chandra's journey as he opens himself to self-examination, family healing, and a more courageous experience of being alive."--Elizabeth Lesser, New York Times bestselling author of Broken Open and co-founder, Omega Institute "I loved this beautiful, beautiful book. It's tender and compassionate, it's written with exquisite care and verve, and it's so so so funny."--Marian Keyes, internationally bestselling author of Angels and Last Chance Saloon "A smart, funny, generous story about an eminent Indian economist who comes of age, finally, at seventy... comic and heartfelt, bracing and moving."--Susan Rieger, author of The Heirs

Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

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Raghu Karnad

Light shelf wear on the jacket. Very subtle. Pages in amazing shape. Crisp and clean. Virtually no mileage. No dog ears or scribbles. Please see photos for reference 

A Story of India's Second World War

A brilliantly conceived nonfiction epic, a war narrated through the lives and deaths of a single family. The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother’s house for as long as he could remember, beheld but never fully noticed. They had all fought in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India. One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front line. Manek, dashing and confident, was a pilot with India’s fledgling air force; gentle Ganny became an army doctor in the arid North-West Frontier. Bobby’s pursuit would carry him as far as the deserts of Iraq and the green hell of the Burma battlefront. The years 1939–45 might be the most revered, deplored, and replayed in modern history. Yet India’s extraordinary role has been concealed, from itself and from the world. In riveting prose, Karnad retrieves the story of a single family—a story of love, rebellion, loyalty, and uncertainty—and with it, the greater revelation that is India’s Second World War. Farthest Field narrates the lost epic of India’s war, in which the largest volunteer army in history fought for the British Empire, even as its countrymen fought to be free of it. It carries us from Madras to Peshawar, Egypt to Burma—unfolding the saga of a young family amazed by their swiftly changing world and swept up in its violence.

Farthest Field

9a0d18b2-b575-44d1-8fc8-1a0f865ec0b6-0

#paperback #fiction #novel #historicalfiction #middlegrade #partition #india #pakistan #hindu #Muslim 

Shy twelve-year-old Nisha, forced to flee her home with her Hindu family during the 1947 partition of India, tries to find her voice and make sense of the world falling apart around her by writing to her deceased Muslim mother in the pages of her diary.

The Night Diary

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#hardcover #vintage #india #muslim #family #rare #multicultural #diverse 

Oregon

My Indian Family: A Story of East and West Within a Muslim Home

#paperback #eastindian #bihari #india #bestseller #bollywood #hindi

Once upon a time, there was a Bihari boy called Madhav. He fell in love with a rich girl from Delhi called Riya. Madhav didn't speak English well. Riya did. Madhav wanted a relationship. Riya didn't. Riya just wanted friendship. Madhav didn't. Riya suggested a compromise. She agreed to be his half-girlfriend. From the author of the blockbuster novels Five Point Someone, One Night @ the Call Center, The 3 Mistakes of My Life, 2 States and Revolution 2020 comes a simple and beautiful love story that will touch your heart and inspire you to chase your dreams.

Half Girlfriend

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Rajeev Balasubramanyam

First edition. 2 specks on base. Otherwise pristine. 

#hardcover #travel #Guyana #India #dazzling #inventive #booktok #Caribbean

Minnesota

In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world. Ultimately, to fulfill his purpose, he prepares to mount an adventure of his own. His journey takes him beyond Guyanese borders, and his companion will be the feisty, wild-haired Jan. In this dazzling novel, propelled by a singularly forceful voice, Rahul Bhattacharya captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, and the paradoxes of searching for life¿s meaning in the escape from home.

The Sly Company of People Who Care

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Peggy Payne

Madame Natraja is an enigmatic expatriate in a city of grace and mystery, poverty and chaos. The Lonely Planet recommends the Saraswati Guest House, and meeting Madame, "a one woman blend of east and west", as well worth the trip. Over the course of a weekend, several guests turn up at the Saraswati, shocked to encounter a three-hundred-some pound, surly, white woman in a sari. Then, when an episode of Hindu-Muslim violence shatters the peace, the entire city is placed under curfew -- no one may leave their home. So begins a period of days blending into nights as Natraja and her Indian cook become entangled in the web of religious violence. And their guests, each slowly falling under the spell of this ancient kingdom by the river -- both enthralled and repelled by the begging children, the public funeral pyres, the holy men bathing in the Ganges at dawn -- feel the rumble of their own inner revolutions as they are drawn further into the folds of their captive city.

Sister India

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Rachel Manija Brown

An American Misfit in India

Rachel Manija Brown describes what it was like to grow up in an ashram in India, discussing how her hippie parents uprooted her from her childhood home in California to live in a drought-stricken ashram in India while they devoted themselves to Meher Baba.

All the Fishes Come Home to Roost

febec235-104a-45f6-ac99-fa7d69cdbdbb-1

Diksha Basu

Pennsylvania

"For the past thirty years, Mr. and Mrs. Jha's lives have been defined by cramped spaces, cut corners, gossipy neighbors, and the small dramas of stolen yoga pants and stale marriages. They thought they'd settled comfortably into their golden years, pleased with their son's acceptance into an American business school. But then Mr. Jha comes into an enormous and unexpected sum of money, and moves his wife from their housing complex in East Delhi to the super-rich side of town, where he becomes eager to fit in as a man of status"--]cProvided by publisher.

The Windfall

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Namrata Patel

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A woman embarks on an unexpected journey into her past in an engrossing novel about identity, family secrets, and rediscovering the need to belong.

Meena Dave is a photojournalist and a nomad. She has no family, no permanent address, and no long-term attachments, preferring to observe the world at a distance through the lens of her camera. But Meena's solitary life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly inherits an apartment in a Victorian brownstone in historic Back Bay, Boston.

Though Meena's impulse is to sell it and keep moving, she decides to use her journalistic instinct to follow the story that landed her in the home of a stranger. It's a mystery that comes with a series of hidden clues, a trio of meddling Indian aunties, and a handsome next-door neighbor. For Meena it's a chance for newfound friendships, community, and culture she never thought possible. And a window into her past she never expected.

Now as everything unknown to Meena comes into focus, she must reconcile who she wants to be with who she really is.

The Candid Life of Meena Dave

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Gitanjali Kolanad

CultureShock! A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette: India

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#paperback #india #wwii #historicalfiction #histfic #kashmir 

By the time she is reunited with her husband, she is a very different woman. Years later, Nerys's granddaughter Mair Ellis clears out her dead father's house and finds an exquisite shawl. Wrapped in its folds is a lock of a child's curly hair. With nothing else to go on, Mair decides to trace her grandparents' roots back to Kashmir, embarking on a quest thatwill change her own life forever. A sweeping multigenerational tale of marriage, isolation, and finding love in a magical place, The Kashmir Shawl is the inimitable Rosie Thomas at her very best.

The Kashmir Shawl

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#paperback #fiction #sisters #nationalbestseller #calcutta #india #cousins #love #friendship #courage perfect condition, name written in flyleaf

Two girls, one the daughter of an upper-caste Calcutta family, the other the daughter of the black sheep of that same family, form a sisterly bond that shatters when one of the girls discovers a dark family secret.

Sister of My Heart

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The New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of Secret Daughter returns with an unforgettable story of family, responsibility, love, honor, tradition, and identity, in which two childhood friends—a young doctor and a newly married bride—must balance the expectations of their culture and their families with the desires of their own hearts. The first of his family to go to college, Anil Patel, the golden son, carries the weight of tradition and his family’s expectations when he leaves his tiny Indian village to begin a medical residency in Dallas, Texas, at one of the busiest and most competitive hospitals in America. When his father dies, Anil becomes the de facto head of the Patel household and inherits the mantle of arbiter for all of the village’s disputes. But he is uneasy with the custom, uncertain that he has the wisdom and courage demonstrated by his father and grandfather. His doubts are compounded by the difficulties he discovers in adjusting to a new culture and a new job, challenges that will shake his confidence in himself and his abilities. Back home in India, Anil’s closest childhood friend, Leena, struggles to adapt to her demanding new husband and relatives. Arranged by her parents, the marriage shatters Leena’s romantic hopes, and eventually forces her to make a desperate choice that will hold drastic repercussions for herself and her family. Though Anil and Leena struggle to come to terms with their identities thousands of miles apart, their lives eventually intersect once more—changing them both and the people they love forever. Tender and bittersweet, The Golden Son illuminates the ambivalence of people caught between past and present, tradition and modernity, duty and choice; the push and pull of living in two cultures, and the painful decisions we must make to find our true selves.

The Golden Son (ARC)

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Melody Razak

"The saga of one family's trials through India's tumultuous partition-when Pakistan split from India-exploring its impact on women, what it means to be othered, and the redemptive power of family"--

Moth (ARC)

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Katherine Boo

Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE “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

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Save this search

Anita Desai

The Artist of Disappearance

Vikas Swarup; Kerry Shale (Narrated by)

Q and A (Audio Book on CD)

Wilbur Smith

Ghost Fire

Praba Ram; Sheela Preuitt

Thukpa for All

K. Shivkumar

The King's Choice

Lavanya Sankaran

The Hope Factory

Carine Fabius

Mehndi

Rajeev Balasubramanyam

Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

Raghu Karnad

Farthest Field

Veera Hiranandani

The Night Diary

Hilda Wernher

My Indian Family: A Story of East and West Within a Muslim Home

Chetan Bhagat

Half Girlfriend

Rajeev Balasubramanyam

Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss

Rahul Bhattacharya

The Sly Company of People Who Care

Peggy Payne

Sister India

Rachel Manija Brown

All the Fishes Come Home to Roost

Diksha Basu

The Windfall

Namrata Patel

The Candid Life of Meena Dave

Gitanjali Kolanad

CultureShock! A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette: India

Rosie Thomas

The Kashmir Shawl

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Sister of My Heart

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

The Golden Son (ARC)

Melody Razak

Moth (ARC)

Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers