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The Year in Books
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After Theory - Terry Eagleton
The golden age of cultural theory (the product of a decade and a half, from 1965 to 1980) is long past. We are living now in an age which, having grown rich in the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also moved beyond them. What kind of new, fresh thinking does this new era demand? -
East West Street- Philippe Sands
A uniquely personal exploration of the origins of international law, centring on the Nuremberg Trials, the city of Lviv and a secret family history The book interweaves the stories of the two Nuremberg prosecutors (Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin) who invented the crimes or genocide and crimes against humanity, the Nazi governor responsible for the murder of thousands in and around Lviv, and incredible acts of wartime bravery. -
Freedom to Think: The Long Struggle to Liberate Our Minds - Susie Alegre
Without a moment's pause, we share our most intimate thoughts with trillion-dollar tech companies. Their algorithms categorize us and jump to conclusions about who we are. This is just the latest front in an age-old struggle. From Galileo to Nudge Theory to Alexa, human rights lawyer Susie Alegre explores how the powerful have always sought to get inside our heads, influence how we think and shape what we buy. -
Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling
In an era when life expectancies stretch 100 years or more and adhering to healthy habits is the only way to earn better medical treatments, ancient "post humans" dominate society with their wealth and power. By embracing the safe and secure, 94-year-old Mia Ziemann has lived a long and quiet life. But Mia has lost the creative drive and ability to love--the holy fire--of the young. When a radical procedure makes Mia young again, she has the chance to break free of society's cloying grasp. -
Adi Purana: Entire Veda as a Single Story - Devdutt Pattanaik
The renowned author takes the reader on a journey through the Adi Purana, covering the entire Veda in a single story. -
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century - Amia Srinivasan
Thrilling, sharp, and deeply humane, philosopher Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex. How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted. -
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. -
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion - Jia Tolentino
What happens to our behaviour when we live most of our lives online? What does it mean to ‘always be optimising’? And what is it about scams and the millennial generation? Offering nuanced and witty reflections on feminism, reality TV, the internet, drugs, identity and more, Trick Mirror is a multifaceted, thought-provoking and entertaining response to our zeitgeist – a must-read for anyone interested in the way we live and think today. -
Victory City - Salman Rushdie
The epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence, only to be consumed by it over the centuries. In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. Brilliantly styled as a translation of an ancient epic, this is a saga of love, adventure, and myth that is in itself a testament to the power of storytelling. -
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida - Shehan Karunatilaka
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka. -
The Runaway Boy - Manoranjan Byapari
This powerful trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels begins in East Pakistan. It tells the story of little Jibon, who arrives at a refugee camp in West Bengal in the arms of his Dalit parents escaping from the Muslim-majority nation. When he is thirteen, Jibon runs away to Calcutta because he has heard that money flies in the air in the big city. Through the travels of this bewildered boy, we witness a newly independent India as it grapples with communalism and grave disparities of all kinds. -
The Nemesis - Manoranjan Byapari
The second part of this extraordinary trilogy takes us into the late 1960s and early 1970s when the rumblings of liberation grew louder in East Pakistan and refugees came pouring into India, seeking asylum in the camps of West Bengal. The Naxalite movement too was gathering momentum. Amidst this bloody battle, we find a twenty-something Jibon in Calcutta, driven to rage by hunger, inequity and a naïve, contagious nationalistic fervour. -
Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism - Karthick Ram Manoharan
This volume is a thematic study of the work and ideas of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy. It analyses Periyar's emancipatory, irreverent and revolutionary critique of religion using the idea of 'political atheism'. Drawing extensively from Periyar's own writings, contemporary accounts of Dravidian politics and the theory of Anarchism, this groundbreaking study provides a new perspective on Periyar's engagements with religion, caste and their collaborations with the state. -
Precedent In English Law - J.W. Harris and Rupert Cross
What can I say? I'm a boring person who likes reading legal books. -
Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie
Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. -
Earthlings - Sayaka Murata
Mind-blowing, dark and wild, the new novel from Sayaka Murata - author of bestseller Convenience Store Woman - asks: how far would you go just to be yourself? Natsuki has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. With her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what. -
Stoner - John Williams
Colum McCann once called Stoner one of the great forgotten novels of the past century. William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. -
The Education of Yuri - Jerry Pinto
‘We are born alone and we die alone. In between, we reach out to other people.’ Over five years in the strange crucible of Elphinstone College in 1980s’ Bombay—the vast and throbbing city that both claims and disowns him—Yuri tries to make sense of himself. And we are drawn, effortlessly and completely, into the spell of his story. This glorious novel is among the best ever written on urban adolescence in India. -
Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he see as as a show trial designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness. He leaves his job, and the city, to spend time with his daughter on her remote farm. They then become victims of a brutal attack. -
Public Choice - A Primer - Eamonn Butler
'Market failure' is a term widely used by politicians, journalists and university and A-level economics students and teachers. However, those who use the term often lack any sense of proportion about the ability of government to correct market failures. Public Choice economics applies realistic insights about human behaviour to the process of government, and it is extremely helpful for all those who have an interest in -- or work in -- public policy to understand this discipline. -
Imaan - Manoranjan Byapari
Imaan Ali had entered Central Jail as an infant with his mother, who was charged with the murder of his father. Zahura Bibi died when he was six, and he grew up, shuttling between a juvenile remand home and the boys’ ward in the prison. Now, twenty years later, he has been released. With no family or home to return to, he ends up at the Jadavpur railway station, becoming a ragpicker on the advice of a former jail-mate, an expert pickpocket. -
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence-a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon. As the treatment takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands tremendously. Algernon suddenly deteriorates. Will the same happen to Charlie? -
The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: An Intellectual Biography of B.R. Ambedkar - Scott R. Stroud
The story of how the Indian reformer Bhimrao Ambedkar reimagined John Dewey's pragmatism. In The Evolution of Pragmatism in India, Scott R. Stroud delivers a comprehensive exploration of the influence of John Dewey's pragmatism on Bhimrao Ambedkar, architect of the Republic of India's constitution. Stroud traces Ambedkar's development in Dewey's Columbia University classes in 1913-1916 through his final years in 1950s India when he rewrote the story of Buddhism. -
Planning Democracy: How A Professor, An Institute, And An Idea Shaped India - Nikhil Menon
India's Five-Year Plans were one of the developing world's most ambitious experiments. Planning Democracy explores how India married liberal democracy to a socialist economy. Planning not only built India's data systems, it even shaped the nature of its democracy. The Five-Year Plans loomed so large that they linked surprisingly far-flung contexts-from computers to Bollywood to Hindutva. -
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Bulgakov paints a powerful picture of Stalin's regime in this allegorical classic. The devil makes a personal appearance in Moscow accompanied by various demons, including a naked girl and a huge black cat. When he leaves, the asylums are full and the forces of law and order are in disarray. Only the Master, a man devoted to truth, and Margarita, the woman he loves, can resist the devil's onslaught. -
The Covenant of Water - Abraham Verghese
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the family witnesses unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life. -
After Messiah - Aakar Patel
Now the Big Man is gone, with nobody named as his successor. Into this void is pushed Mira, who is reluctant at first but increasingly interested in the position she finds herself in. Will she use her authority to further her agenda, or will she hold on to her principles? Watched by her political rivals, Jayeshbhai and Swamiji, and guided by well-wishers Ayesha, Prabhu and Du Bois, she marches on and discovers something about power—and about herself. -
South vs North - Nilakantan RS
Compare two children – one born in north India, the other in the south. The child from south India is far less likely to die in the first year of her life or lose her mother during childbirth. Why is south India doing so much better than the north? And what does that mean? In this superbly argued book, data scientist Nilakantan RS shows us how and why the southern states are outperforming the rest of the country and its consequences in an increasingly centralized India. -
The Use of Man - Aleksandar Tišma
The Use of Man starts with an unexpected discovery. World War II is ending. Sredoje Lazukić has been fighting all through it. Now, as one of the victorious Partisans, he has come home to Novi Sad. He visits the house he grew up in. Sredoje survived. Vera and Milinko have survived too. But what survives? A few years back Sredoje, Vera, and Milinko were teenagers, struggling to make sense of life. Life, they now know, can be more bitter than death.