Showing results by narrator "Sneha Mathan" in All Categories

When the British Empire sets its sights on India in the mid-nineteenth century, it expects a quick and easy conquest. India is fractured and divided into kingdoms, each independent and wary of one another, seemingly no match for the might of the English. But when they arrive in the Kingdom of Jhansi, the British army is met with a surprising challenge.

Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.

In Phantom Plague, Vidya Krishnan, traces the history of tuberculosis from the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. In a narrative spanning century, Krishnan shows how superstition and folk remedies made way for scientific understanding of TB, such that it was controlled and cured in the West.

With The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Six, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and 33 of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2020.

India, 1986: Mukta, a 10-year-old village girl from the lower-caste Yellama cult, has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a temple prostitute, as her mother and grandmother did before her. In an attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, high-spirited eight-year-old Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past.

Every day, nine-year-old Yasmin borrows a book from Book Uncle, a retired teacher who has set up a free lending library on the street corner. But when the mayor tries to shut down the rickety bookstand, Yasmin has to take her nose out of her book and do something.

An experienced psychologist, Maggie carefully maintains emotional distance from her patients. But when she meets a young Indian woman who tried to kill herself, her professional detachment disintegrates. Cut off from her family in India, Lakshmi is desperately lonely and trapped in a loveless marriage to a domineering man who limits her world to their small restaurant and grocery store.

Young Arabel's life is changed forever when her father, a taxi driver, brings home an injured bird he finds in the street. This wacky raven eats everything in sight, answers the telephone by squawking "Nevermore!", and causes chaos wherever he goes - but Arabel loves her new feathered friend, whom she names Mortimer.

Rumi Vasi, the daughter of two Indian émigrés, has a gift for numbers. Her father, a self-made mathematics professor, believes that strict discipline is the key to nurturing her genius if the family has any hope of making its mark on its adoptive country. Between her father's ever more regimented study schedules and her mother's conservative beliefs about mingling with the opposite sex, Rumi has never had a chance to adapt socially.

Growing up in a small fishing village in 1980s Iran, 11-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister, Mahtab, are fascinated by America. They keep lists of English vocabulary words and collect contraband copies of Life magazine and Beatles cassettes. So when Saba suddenly finds herself abandoned, alone with her father in Iran, she is certain that her mother and sister have moved to America without her. Bereft, she aches for their company, and for the Western life she believes she is being denied. All her life she had been taught that "fate is in the blood", which must mean that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea.

1964 Karachi, Pakistan. Rozeena will lose her home—her parents' safe haven since fleeing India and the terrors of Partition—if her medical career doesn't take off soon. But success may come with at a price. Meanwhile the interwoven lives of her childhood best friends—Haaris, Aalya, and Zohair—seem to be unraveling with each passing day. The once small and inconsequential differences between their families' social standing now threaten to divide them. Then one fateful night someone ends up dead and the life they once took for granted shatters.

In this transfixing novel, a young woman comes of age in 1960s- and 1970s-era Bombay, a vanished world that is complex and indelibly rendered. Vidya’s childhood is marked by the shattering absence and then the bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home.

Arabel Jones and her pet raven, Mortimer, find adventure wherever they go. In this silly sequel to Arabel's Raven, when they take a cruise, Mortimer floats out to sea on a grand piano. When they go to the zoo, Mortimer tries to get even with three giraffes that stole his doughnuts. Even at home, there's an excitement when the rambunctious raven flies away with a priceless treasure that was buried at their local park - King Arthur sword!

Sapna Sinha, an ordinary salesgirl in an electronics store in downtown Delhi, is approached by Vinay Mohan Acharya, a billionaire industrialist and one of India's richest men. He offers to make her CEO of his company. There is only one catch - she must pass seven tests from the "textbook of life". Thus begins the most challenging journey Sapna has ever undertaken - one that will test her character, her courage, and her capabilities. Along the way she encounters a host of memorable personalities, from a vain Bollywood superstar to a kleptomaniac Gandhian.

This modern, groundbreaking YA anthology explores the complexity and beauty of interracial and LGBTQ+ relationships where differences are front and center. When people ask me what this anthology is about, I'm often tempted to give them the complicated answer: It's about race and about how being different from the person you love can matter but how it can also not matter, and it's about Chinese pirate ghosts, black girl vigilantes, colonial India, a flower festival, a garden of poisons, and so, so much else.

Augusta Travers has spent the last three years avoiding the stifling expectations of New York society and her family's constant disappointment. As the nation's most fearless - and reviled - columnist, Gussie travels the country with her Kodak camera and spins stories for women unable to leave hearth and home. But when her adventurous nature lands her in the middle of a scandal at the worst possible moment, she's forced to leave America entirely.

Written by the much-admired Italo-Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, Miral is a novel that focuses on remarkable women whose lives unfold in the turbulent political climate along the borders of Israel and Palestine. The story begins with Hind, a woman who sacrifices everything to establish a school for refugee Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem. Years later, Miral arrives at the school after her mother commits suicide.

This exceptional and powerful anthology explores the joys, heartbreaks and triumphs of immigration, with stories by critically acclaimed and best-selling YA authors who are shaped by the journeys they and their families have taken from home - and to find home. 

Escaping from an abusive marriage, 17-year-old Lakshmi makes her way alone to the vibrant 1950s pink city of Jaipur. There she becomes the most highly requested henna artist - and confidante - to the wealthy women of the upper class. But trusted with the secrets of the wealthy, she can never reveal her own....

To the world he is Sri Ramakrishna - godly avatar, spiritual master, beloved guru. To Rani Rashmoni, she of low caste and large inheritance, he is the Brahmin fated to defy tradition. But to Hriday, his nephew, he is just Uncle - maddening, bewildering Uncle, prone to entering trances at the most inconvenient of times, known to sneak out to the forest at midnight, who must be vigilantly safeguarded not only against jealous enemies and devotees with ulterior motives but also against that most treasured yet insidious of sulfur-rich vegetables: the cauliflower.