Indian Food, Indian Fiction

THE BOOK
Set on the squash courts of south London, Western Lane follows eleven-year-old Gopi, the quiet youngest of three sisters, as she trains relentlessly under the watchful eye of her father. In the wake of their mother’s death, the family’s grief is never spoken aloud, but it shapes everything - the routines, the silences, the fierce discipline of the game. As Gopi’s talent sharpens, so do the pressures placed upon her, and the novel gently explores how love, loss, and ambition coexist within a family learning how to endure. Spare, intimate, and deeply moving, Western Lane is a meditation on childhood, control, and the ways we survive what we cannot name.

THE AUTHOR
Chetna Maroo is a British writer. Western Lane is her debut novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her writing is known for its restraint, emotional precision, and attention to interior lives shaped by migration, family bonds, and unspoken grief.

THE BOOK
India, 1857--the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.
Farrell's story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion--at once brutal, blundering, and wistful--is soon revealed.
The Siege of Krishnapur is a companion to Troubles, about the Easter 1916 rebellion in Ireland, and The Singapore Grip, which takes place just before World War II, as the sun begins to set upon the British Empire. Together these three novels offer an unequaled picture of the follies of empire.
Winner of the Booker Prize.

THE AUTHOR
James Gordon Farrell, known as J.G. Farrell, was a Liverpool-born novelist of Irish descent. Farrell gained prominence for his historical fiction, most notably his Empire Trilogy (Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip), dealing with the political and human consequences of British colonial rule. The Siege of Krishnapur won the 1973 Booker Prize. On 19 May 2010 it was announced that Troubles had won the Lost Man Booker Prize, which was a prize created to recognize works published in 1970 (a group that had not previously been open for consideration due to a change in the eligibility rules at the time).
Farrell's career was cut short when he was drowned off the coast of Ireland at the age of 44.

THE BOOK
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

THE AUTHOR
Banu Mushtaq (ಬಾನು ಮುಷ್ತಾಕ್, born 1948) is an activist, lawyer and writer from the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She writes in the Kannada language and her works have also been published in Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and, most recently, English.