Indian Food, Indian Fiction

THE BOOK
The tales in No Presents Please take the ordinary, mundane lives of normal people — young couples, lonely bachelors, struggling workers, winners and losers, invisible people — and shine a quiet spotlight on them.
These wonderful little tales ask us to stop and wonder about the guy in the flat above us whom we’ve never talked about, or the bus driver we see every morning but treat like he’s part of the bus, or the angry family next door who are always fighting but we don’t know why.
No Presents Please is set in Mumbai; every person in every story has made this city a part of them; it has raised them, and they are a part of it. They keep its lights on. It’s through them that we get to understand the city from so many different angles.
The variety on offer in No Presents Please is extraordinary. The variety of places, jobs, ages, situations, emotions, and backgrounds. This book is a full tapestry of Mumbai life; it’s glistening and dirty all at once. It’s exciting and heartbreaking. It’s fast and slow, frightening and gripping.
This book, like the city in which it’s set, is humming with the lives and loves and losses of ordinary, fascinating, terrible, wonderful people.
THE AUTHOR
Jayant Kaikini is a Kannada poet, short-story writer, columnist and playwright, as well as an award-winning lyricist, script and dialogue writer for Kannada films. He won his first Karnataka Sahitya Akademi award at the age of nineteen in 1974, and has since won the award three times, in addition to winning various other awards in India, including the first Kusumagraj Rashtriya Bhasha Sahitya Puraskar. No Presents Please, his volume of selected stories, is the first book in translation to have won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

THE BOOK
The story of One Part Woman concerns a married couple in a rural Indian village. They are happy together – so happy in fact that the wife, Ponna, remarks often on how wonderful her husband is, and what she wouldn’t do for him.
The black mark on their life being that they cannot conceive a child together. And what, for them, is a tragic disappointment becomes something wholly blown up within their two families and their community.
Whispers and gossip spread like wildfire, and it in fact goes beyond pressure and guilt for them as they gently become pawns in their families’ games of conception.
By the book’s halfway point, no longer is it their choice how they conceive, but rather something that their brothers and parents must play at, as though Ponna and her husband Kali are their chess pieces, and the upcoming Chariot Festival their game board.
What’s so successful about One Part Woman’s exploration of this is how it subtly twists its supporting cast from people ignorant to their own actions into people who know what they are doing and couldn’t care less.
Ritual and tradition are at once exciting fascinations and terrifying, dangerous creatures in the world of this novel — something to admire and fear.
THE AUTHOR
Perumal Murugan is the star of contemporary Tamil literature. He has written ten novels and five collections each of short stories and poetry. His best-known novel One Part Woman was longlisted for the inaugural National Book Award for Translation, and it won the prestigious ILF Samanvay Bhasha Samman for writing in Indian languages and the Translation Prize from India's National Academy of Letters.

THE BOOK
A charming and atmospheric debut mystery featuring a 25-year-old Indian police sergeant investigating a missing persons case in colonial Fiji
1914, Fiji: Akal Singh would rather be anywhere but this tropical paradise—or, as he calls it, “this godforsaken island.” After a promising start to his police career in his native India and Hong Kong, Akal has been sent to Fiji as punishment for a humiliating professional mistake. Lonely and grumpy, Akal plods through his work and dreams of getting back to Hong Kong.
When an indentured Indian woman goes missing from a sugarcane plantation and Fiji’s newspapers scream “kidnapping,” the inspector-general reluctantly assigns Akal the case, giving him strict instructions to view this investigation as nothing more than cursory. Akal, eager to achieve redemption, agrees—but soon finds himself far more invested than he could have expected.
Now not only is he investigating a disappearance, but also confronting the brutal realities of the indentured workers’ existence and the racism of the British colonizers in Fiji—along with his own thorny notions of personhood and caste. Early interrogations of the white plantation owners, Indian indentured laborers, and native Fijians yield only one conclusion: there is far more to this case than meets the eye.
Nilima Rao’s sparkling debut mystery offers an unflinching look at the evils of colonialism, even as it brims with wit, vibrant characters, and fascinating historical detail.

THE AUTHOR
Nilima Rao is a Fijian Indian Australian who has always referred to herself as "culturally confused." She has since learned that we are all confused in some way and has been published on the topic by Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service as part of the SBS Emerging Writers Competition and now feels better about the whole thing. When she isn't writing, Nilima can be found wrangling data (the dreaded day job) or wandering around Melbourne laneways in search of the next new wine bar. A Disappearance in Fiji is her first novel, and she is currently working on the second in the series.