The latest work by the author of 'The Forest of Enchantments' and 'The Last Queen' is set on the cusp of India's independence. The novel begins in the idyllic setting of Ranipur, a village in Bengal 'safe from the rising turbulence in the country'. Nabakumar Ganguly is a doctor who runs a clinic in Calcutta with Dr. Abdullah but the former is facing financial difficulties because of his magnanimity towards poorer clients, much to the disapproval of his pragmatic wife Bina. They should be thinking of the dowry for their three daughters --- Priya, Jamini, and Deepa. The youngest of the three, Priya, idolizes her father and wants to follow in her father's footsteps. Nabakumar's friend Somnath gives him the necessary push to allow her to appear for the exam. Deepa is her mother's favourite and enjoys most of the privileges while Jamini is dutiful, the archetypal less favoured middle child. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni novel is a homage to Sarat Chandra and 'Sahitya Samrat' Bankim Chandra and yet she manages to navigate through the plot effortlessly with an immediacy that is the hallmark of the greatest writers of our generation. There are numerous Indian writers in English who are great at storytelling but there are few who manage the art with such a deft touch. Even in the bucolic refuge of Ranipur, readers are aware of the ominous and underlying tremors occurring in Calcutta and the rest of the country which will surface soon with cataclysmic consequences. The rest of the novel promises to be a page turner and possibly yet another in the series of Divakaruni's masterpieces.

Popular Science has a new storyteller and one who can weave a mesmerizing labyrinth of the banal and even the often neglected aspects of our existence. The leitmotif of his book is an organism's Umwelt --- its 'sensory bubble' or 'perceptual world' --- is both poetic and a recursively hypnotic narrative technique. If Carl Sagan was a master of storytelling about the cosmos, Yong is his successor in the hidden sensory realms around us. He compares tremendous olfactory capabilities of dogs to that of humans in a fascinating way only to debunk the myth that scientific basis for such comparison can be misleading. The vivid description of how crucial pheromones are to the ant's existence makes it almost unputdownable and you find yourself fighting the urge to sleep even at 2 am in the morning. One can almost visualise his lines being read in a documentary with David Attenborough's voiceover. This is his first book, but at the risk of sounding repetitive, like Sagan, Yong evokes the impulse to rush through his book only to pick up his next, or as in the latter case, his previous one. It is difficult to retain the reader's interest, more so, in the popular science genre. For the sake of popular science, one can only hope that the rest of the book matches up to expectations, but, intuitively, it almost seems that Yong has mastered the art of exceeding expectations quite consistently.

Janice Pariat's work is a plethora of heartwarming episodes with endearing characters starting with the narrator Shai, her father, Kima and, of course, the indomitable Oiñ. Jaded and with 'no inner compass', Shai travels from the capital fleeing from the air and as revealed through her inner dialogue "because something---I don't know what---has been lost." This raises her mother's suspicions which she finds almost stifling upon arriving home but the hills of Shillong act like a panacea for her existential angst as she starts breathing in the untainted air and soaking up the intermittent but rejuvenating spells of sunlight during her meanderings through the forest. Her father's remarkable knowledge of trees almost verges on a metaphysical connection with nature as he unequivocally propagates that humanity's "gravest crime" is our "plant bias---the tendency to underappreciate or ignore the flora around us". The novel also provides a glimpse of Shillong in a state of transition and how one of its famous rooftop cafés has imitated a design that is reminiscent of a city café instead of adopting the traditional natural aesthetics. Then comes one of the defining moments of the novel, a bildungsroman adventure for Shia who decides to visit Oiñ by embarking on what turns out to be an extremely unnerving prospect for someone who has explored almost nothing of Meghalaya's rural, almost idyllic locales. Pariat is a seasoned writer, yet, her writing is as rejuvenating as the hills of Shillong, free from affections and rich in a mystical exploration of people and their natural environs.

Black River by Nilanjana S. Roy is a noir mystery that takes the readers on a dark and fatalistic journey into a story of lost innocence which is coloured with immense grief. What happens to a father whose child's life is suddenly cut short? Does the final coming together of the pieces of the puzzle bring any sense of closure? Why do we consider murder to be the most unforgiving crime? The Yamuna, groaning with the burden of pollutants, flows through the city of Delhi and the story as the black river. It remains a silent spectator to the crimes that unfold on its banks and on its waters. But do human beings have the capacity to swallow everything like the river? Roy delves into these pertinent questions and charts out a narrative that sheds light on these questions of loss and grief.

While exploring the desires of different strata of Indian women in her book, Shrayana Bhattacharya places at the centre of it a sociological investigation on the rampant social and economic disparity between men and women. Desperately Seeking Shahrukh is an intelligent blend of an empathetic observation of the lives of Indian women and an objective statistical analysis of the gendered nature of our economy. Bhattacharya acknowledges the plurality of the world created in Shah Rukh's films. It is romantic and patriarchal; idealistic and regressive. Despite this convergence of seemingly opposing views, women yearn for a man like Shah Rukh for his emotional vulnerability and the lofty romantic standards he sets for his female viewers. Shah Rukh is a representation of their aspirational identity; their quiet pursuit for freedom, vulnerability and equity of treatment in personal and public spheres.

Vasudhendra has assayed a novel that is monumental in scale and it takes immense daring to conceive of such a undertaking. The novel oscillates between the backdrop of the Tejo in Portugal during the Renaissance and the banks of the Tungabhadra in the Vijaynagara Empire. Gabriel and Bella are young lovers caught in the web of an entrenched antisemitic social setting with the economic disparity between their families proving to be as insurmountable an obstacle towards their marriage as much as religious opposition. On the other hand, Belsham and Antonio's friendship is also tested when Queen Isabella of Spain insists upon the forced conversion of the Jewish community for her daughter's marriage with King Manuel. The lovers are caught in the midst of the tumultuous tide that threatens to have a cataclysmic effect on their lives. Humiliated by his beloved's father due to his family's modest economic situation, Gabriel decides to risk his life by embarking on a voyage to India. This is where the scene shifts to the Vijaynagara Empire. One can only wonder that if the setting that was less familiar to the author was presented with such palpable vividness, to what extent will the reader be swept away when the narrative resumes in the historical grandeur of the author's homeland?

Translations can often seem tedious due to entrenched cultural and linguistic barriers. Amar Mitra's novel is a confluence of resplendent folklore and gruesome socio-political realities. From the first page itself, he has effortlessly imbued the magical realism narrative framework with the ingenuity of a vibrant imagination. The novel proceeds in the form of an oddly invigorating cyclical and hypnotical structure moving from one page to the next with the lethargic yet graceful, almost imperceptible movement of a danseuse not even once letting the reader's attention wander or slip for even a fraction of a moment. The fisherfolk of Dhanapati's island congregate from the months of Ashwin to Chaitra according to the Bengali calendar. Dhanapati is the name of the island, as well as of Dhanapati, the oldest inhabitant of the island, and, according to some accounts, that of its first inhabitant though the current Dhanapati vehemently disagrees that there has been anyone else before him. Vagabonds like Batashi have a home for six months of the year where they arrive emaciated and then during their stay are rejuvenated in body and spirit turning into voluptuous beings who become the object of lustful villainy of the trader Dasharath Singh. The inescapable avarice and corruption of the law enforcers as embodied by the police constable Mangal Midde and the violence inflicted on the poor and neglected strays of society is highlighted with razor-sharp precision. It will be difficult to find a voice that is more brutal about socio-economic realities yet so humane while presenting the most heinous atrocities that people nourished and nurtured by the same piece of earth and sky are capable of inflicting upon each other.

When an adept marketeer writes books, the result is a book such as 'The Big Bang of Numbers'. Everything from the title itself to the introduction cheekily subtitled "The Poper Made Me Write This Book" promises to be a fascinating read even for a subject that is revered by the millions but billions find intimidating, to put it mildly. For a late bloomer like myself who started appreciating mathematics only after those excruciating experiences with high school algebra, trigonometry and calculus, mathematics now seems to be the forbidden love affair from one's childhood, and adolescence, that could not be consummated due to extraneous factors. So, any new book on the philosophy of science or mathematics is always a means to rekindle that flame reinforced by that sense of hapless nostalgia. As book progresses, the ambitious, albeit unoriginal, project hailed as "creatio ex nihilio" (creation out of nothing) seems to fall way short of expectations. To borrow from Shakespeare's Macbeth, the book ends up being a marketing pitch that is "full of sound and fury" and very little substance. Suri's work seems to have distant echoes of Terence Tao's 'Analysis I', where the latter too undertakes the task of building all the axioms of arithmetic, more precisely, number theory and set theory from the simplest axioms in the first two chapters. To his credit, Suri has changed the order of these two branches of mathematics, making it more accessible to the uninitiated. Here's to hoping that the rest of the book has more substance and doesn't leave a reader who really wanted to like, no, love the book on the subject whose wonders he would've liked to explore during his formative years.

A fictional narrative which oscillates between historical accounts, social commentary and a fictional storyline might seem daunting and, perhaps, tedious to some writers. Debarati Mukhopadhyay traverses these seemingly incongruent aspects with effortless ease. The setting changes within a few page from Nobokishore Dutta's compound in Mechhuabajar in Calcutta to Mowshaat, formerly known as Bishwanathpur within the historical backdrop of the latter half of the nineteenth century at a heightened pace of unsettling drama concerning Krishnoshundor's family. The poignancy of Bhubonmoni's excruciating plight is depicted by the judgement she has to face from the male bastions of society who also have the sole right to debate and determine her fate for being raped. The self-appointed standard bearers of morality cannot wait to rid the village of her and, by extension, Krishnoshundor's family because his brother married a heathen. The proposal to save her soul as laid down in the 'shaastor' is gratuitously provided by the lecherous Paachkori Mukhopadhyay who wishes to ravage her for thirty nights as penance for her transgression of being violated by non-believers. Only then can Bhubonmoni regain her place as a brahmin and be reintegrated into society. Torn between his efforts to ensure that his children are not treated as social pariahs and rescuing his sister from the ravenous intentions of Paachkori, Krishnoshundor envisages the conniving Horihor as heaven sent and falls into his trap. The novel creates a startlingly refreshing displacement of the moral latitude enjoyed by the privileged male members of the times with potent perspicacity. A translation from the original Bengali novel might not capture the depth and scale of the many lives and worlds conceived by the author. Arunava Sinha effortlessly moves between these peripheries effortlessly and demonstrates that in the hands of an adept translator, a wonderful work can occupy similar spaces in the original as in the language of its translation.