Petals!

There are books that blaze into your thoughts and here's a book that definitely stayed within me even after weeks of reading it, With its blazing red flower cover, Mini Sukumaran Nair's novel B3/703, Gulmohar Park , caught my attention in a bookshop. As a child, I grew up reading the books of Enid Blyton, RK Narayan and Anita Desai.  Mini Sukumaran Nair's  refreshing narrative brought back bittersweet memories of those growing up years.  Right from the first page, I felt like I could curl up with this heartwarming novel. And just in case you are wondering, this isn't a novel that was sent to me for review nor do I know the author or its publisher. I just loved the book, that's it! This heartwarming tale of childhood, family drama and tragic upheavals is narrated from the perspective of a little girl called Madhura , whose mother Vani is a maid in the home of an affluent Punjabi family and later on, through the perspective of her mother's employers, A...

Published by FingerPrint! Publishing, Subrata Dasgupta's novel 'Voice of the Rain Season' is not an easy book to describe for it involves a journey that takes you back into time, spanning four generations and catapulting you into the epicenter of a Bengali family's long kept secret that is tied to notions of identity, homecoming, language, love and loss. [ DO READ: The Amazing Tale of Peddabottu ]  The telling of  Subrata Dasgupta's novel  opens in the US. The protagonist is  Joya Bose, a twenty five year old Indian lecturer, who is living with Martin Shawncross, an American undergraduate student at the University where she teaches. Initially, Joya is surprised that Martin Shawncross is not only familiar with Rabindranath Tagore's poetry but is also passionate in his interpretation of it. She is delighted when he tells her that her paternal grandmother Manjula is a Bengali, who had married his grandfather, an American. Manjula's twin sister Nili...