Book - Jacaranda Literary Agency

Becoming Goan

Goa’s magnetism and its promise of a relaxed, almost bohemian lifestyle, have always attracted admirers and colonizers. Before the locals could make up their minds about such interlopers, Covid-19 brought hordes of them to town―Michelle Mendonça Bambawale was one of them. In June 2020, Michelle found herself moving to the 160-year-old house she had inherited in Siolim, a village in North Goa, with her human and canine family. Having never lived in Goa before, she couldn’t help but wonder if her Goan ancestry made her an insider or if she would forever remain an outsider. In this memoir, she confronts her complex relationship with her Goan Catholic heritage and explores themes of identity, culture, migration, stereotypes and labels. She also uncovers some of the uncanniest legends that pervade Siolim, including those of St. Anthony and the Snake, Sao Joao, and the statue of Beethoven. She also takes us back to Siolim and Goa in the 1970s and 1980s, where she spent her summer vacations without paved roads or electricity, pulling water from a well. Today, she dodges reeking septic tankers, earth movers and piling plastic garbage while walking her Labrador, Haruki. Becoming Goan is a heartfelt and charming story of Michelle's love for this land that her grandparents left her. She cares deeply about Goa's biodiversity and is distraught about the environmental impact of tourism, construction and mining. Her devotion to Mother Earth deepens as she learns more about her roots, steeped as they are in syncretic traditions.

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Fraudster Tales

By Vijay Narayan Govind

‘A splendid book … thoroughly fun and riveting’ S. Hussain Zaidi, bestselling author of R.A.W. Hitman Ten financial scandals that gave the world a run for its money – from ancient times to the twenty-first century. Crime stories have fascinated audiences all over the world for centuries. But as times have evolved, the spotlight on financial wrongdoing has further intensified. In Fraudster Tales: History’s Greatest Financial Criminals and Their Catastrophic Crimes, seasoned finance professional turned true crime writer Vijay Narayan Govind presents ten cases that have transformed the course of Indian and global economics. From Hegestratos, the Greek trickster from 300 BCE, to Haridas Mundhra, the first notable scam artist in independent India, readers are transported to the murky world of white-collar crimes. Along the way, we meet the criminally astute Natwarlal, whose infamous cons have become legendary, Charles Ponzi, a name that is now synonymous with get-rich-quick schemes, and witness Singaporean gambler Chia Teck Leng’s shocking banking frauds in the twenty-first century. Skilfully weaving together history, intrigue and morality, Fraudster Tales takes us on a thrilling journey through financial deceit, where the line between right and wrong is blurred and the consequences of greed are catastrophic.

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Girls Who Stray – Anisha Lalvani

By Anisha Lalvani

‘A returns from an obscure English university, armed with a degree that has no value, to her new home in outer Delhi, a home of feeble men -- her retired father and grandfather, to the dissolution of her parent’s marriage. As she embarks on an affair with a property developer and becomes entangled in a double murder, she confronts the anxieties of the crime, along with the anxieties of living in a hyper-modern city seething in inequality. Along the way, she navigates heartbreak and the strength to rebel through small acts of freedom.’

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Good Girl

By Unmana

Good Girl draws a throughline between familial abuse and oppressive societies/governments, utilising the backdrop of the protests that erupted in India in 2019 after an unjust immigration law was enacted. The novel is narrated by a young woman with a seemingly perfect life who compulsively cheats on her husband. Her father’s death takes her to her childhood home in Guwahati and offers some answers in revived memories of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. She goes back to Mumbai but finds herself increasingly alienated from her old life. Filled with rage and despair, she starts fantasising about killing herself. The passing of an unjust immigration law jolts her out of her stupor. She throws herself into protests, finding an outlet for her love for her city and her eagerness to be part of a community. But she has to lose everything—her job, her husband, her friends, the illusion of a relationship with her mother, and come close to losing herself—before she can regain hope.

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Good Girls

By Leesa Gazi

In this richly unnerving tale about family secrets and expectations, two sisters are at lifelong odds with each other, their mother, and themselves―and as every hour becomes more twisted than the last, they are all pushed to their breaking point.

Lovely and Beauty know their place: at home, beneath the watchful eye of their mother. Life has never included friends, an education, or anything the sisters can call their own. Their comings and goings are supervised by Farida. Otherwise, they don’t come and go at all.

That changes on Lovely’s fortieth birthday. In a stroke of inexplicable fortune, Farida permits her eldest daughter to go to the Gausia Market alone, with no instructions but to abide by her curfew. For once on her own, Lovely is goaded by the voice in her head to push her mother’s―and her own―boundaries.

New experiences and old memories abound as her family awaits her return. But with the taste of freedom so fresh on her tongue, Lovely is spurred on by her disembodied companion to hang on to her newfound independence. When home isn’t a safe haven, Lovely must find somewhere else to turn.

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History’s Angel

By Anjum Hassan

Alif is a middle-aged, mild-mannered history teacher, living in contemporary Delhi, at a time in India's history when Muslims are seen as either hapless victims or live threats. Though his life's passion is the history he teaches, the present is pressing down on him: his wife is set on a bigger house and a better car while trying to ace her MBA exams; his teenage son wants to quit school to get rich; his supercilious colleagues are suspicious of his perorations; and his old friend Ganesh has just reconnected with a childhood sweetheart with whom Alif was always rather enamoured himself. And then the unthinkable happens. While Alif is leading a school field trip, a student goads him and, in a fit of anger, Alif twists his ear. His job suddenly on the line, Alif finds his life rapidly descending into chaos. Meanwhile, his home city, too, darkens under the spreading shadow of violence. In this darkly funny, sharply observed and deeply moving novel, Anjum Hasan deftly and delicately explores the force and the consequences of remembering your people's history in an increasingly indifferent milieu.

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I Named My Sister Silence

By Manoj Rupda

AN UNUSUALLY QUIET BUT SEARING NOVEL ABOUT THE DESTRUCTION OF PEOPLES AND LANDS A little boy follows an elephant into a forest, fascinated and as if in a trance. His foray ends in tragedy, for the elephant is eaten alive by wild dogs even as the boy is sitting atop it. Remembering this years later, aboard a giant ship, he wonders if it is his destiny to witness the destruction of immense things. Like the land of Bastar, like the elephant, like his ship that will soon be decommissioned. He recalls his half-sister’s immense silence too. Madavi Irma, the silent girl who nurtured him and gave him a good education by selling what she collected from the forest. Until one day, she left home to join the Maoist Dada Log. When he returns home, Bastar is afire. The Adivasis had mounted an armed rebellion to protect their land and lives. In retaliation, whole villages have been razed to the ground and their inhabitants stuffed into dingy camps. Determined to seek out his sister, he enters the forest once again, this time as a young man, and is soon confronted with the elaborate deceptions of those who rule and of those who profit from the land they do not own or understand. Manoj Rupda’s I Named My Sister Silence is a quietly fierce work that continues to burn bright in the mind long after the last page has been read.

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PEOPLE FROM BLOOMINGTON

By Tiffany Tsao

*Winner of the 2023 PEN Translation Award* An eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic short story collection about Americans in America by one of Indonesia’s most prominent writers, now in an English translation for its fortieth anniversary, with a foreword by Intan Paramaditha. In these seven stories of People from Bloomington, our peculiar narrators find themselves in the most peculiar of circumstances and encounter the most peculiar of people. Set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s, this is far from the idyllic portrait of small-town America. Rather, sectioned into apartment units and rented rooms, and gridded by long empty streets and distances traversable only by car, it’s a place where the solitary can all too easily remain solitary; where people can at once be obsessively curious about others, yet fail to form genuine connections with anyone. The characters feel their loneliness acutely and yet deliberately estrange others. Budi Darma paints a realist world portrayed through an absurdist frame, morbid and funny at the same time. For decades, Budi Darma has influenced and inspired many writers, artists, filmmakers, and readers in Indonesia, yet his stories transcend time and place. With People from Bloomington, Budi Darma draws us to a universality recognized by readers around the world—the cruelty of life and the difficulties that people face in relating to one another while negotiating their own identities. The stories are not about “strangeness” in the sense of culture, race, and nationality. Instead, they are a statement about how everyone, regardless of nationality or race, is strange, and subject to the same tortures, suspicions, yearnings, and peculiarities of the mind. Praise “First published in Indonesia 40 years ago, this story collection from celebrated author Darma gets a second life—and an English translation—as a Penguin Classic. Across seven stories set in the gridded streets and rented rooms of Bloomington, Ind., Darma’s characters navigate their morbidly funny lives in this meditation on alienation, failed connection, and the universal strangeness of the human mind.” —The Millions

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Redemption

By Harish Vasudevan

A PACY NOVEL OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, SET IN BANGALORE The day begins innocently enough, a cool, breezy morning in Bangalore in the spring of 2007. For seventeen-year-old Shalini Gowda, it's a day for celebration--no more school, friends to go clubbing with, and her favourite adults coming over for dinner later at night. Life couldn't be better. Which is how her parents, Archana and Raju, feel too, in anticipation of a relaxed evening at home with old friends. Until the phone rings and they hear the panicked voice of Shalini's friend, Tabassum. Something has happened, would they rush to the club? Shalini needs them... A fast-paced novel that rushes you along on a tide of unpredictable emotions and action, Redemption speaks directly to our worst fears and anxieties.

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The book of Bullah

By Manjul Bajaj

The poetry of Bulleh Shah (1680–1758), a great Sufi saint of Punjab, has had enduring appeal over the centuries, inspiring fresh interpretations and garnering new converts to this day. His poems are as full of emotional intensity and passionate fervour, as they are of rebellion and rage against religious dogma. They will force the reader into deep reflections on the purpose of life and the certainty of death, and at the same time inspire spiritual longing and mystical ecstasy. In this volume, Manjul Bajaj interprets the imagery and symbols, metaphors and motifs of Bulleh Shah's verses for the modern reader and presents a hundred of his poems in a fresh and lucid English translation.

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The Grammar of My Body

By Abhishek Anicca

The word that is often associated with stories about disability: inspiring. This is especially true of social media and online media, with posts of people with disabilities being ‘inspiring’ by doing everyday things, and articles that emphasise what they have achieved, despite their disability. But do people actually know the reality of being a person with a disability or a chronic illness, sometimes both, and their experiences and struggles? The Grammar of My Body attempts to transcend the ‘inspirational’ narrative by telling everyday stories of living with disability and chronic illness. Through essays that focus on first-person narration and authenticity, it provides readers a glimpse into the life of a disabled and chronically ill person. While each disabled and ill body has unique embodied experiences, there are common threads that cut across disabilities, and the first-hand expression of these experiences is front and centre in The Grammar of My Body. In language that is conversational and informal, but also truthful and unflinching, Anicca’s wry and personal writing compels the reader to become at once distant from, and proximate to his experiences. This book has raw and deeply personal essays about navigating life with disability and illness; everyday struggles of the body and mind; as well as lesser-known questions of care, help, dignity, dating, and love. Anicca addresses intersections that have largely remained unspoken in Indian society, such as masculinity and fatness and on growing up having developed a disability in smalltown India. What ties all of these essays together is neither disability nor illness, but the idea of vulnerability. The universal experience of vulnerabilities—may they be of not having control over our bodies or minds, or our everyday lives, dreams, and aspirations—is a powerful way of building a more empathetic world. Although these essays are focused on the author, the mirror often turns away, giving us a reflection of societal behaviour that underlines an individual’s experience of living with disability and illness.

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The Great Flap of 1942

By Mukund Padmanabhan

The Great Flap of 1942 is a narrative history of a neglected and scarcely known period―between December 1941 and mid-1942―when all of India was caught in a state of panic. This was largely a result of the British administration's mistaken belief that Japan was on the verge of launching a full-fledged invasion. It was a time when the Raj became unduly alarmed, when the tongue of rumour wagged wildly about Japanese prowess and British weakness and when there was a huge and largely unmapped exodus (of Indians and Europeans) from both sides of the coastline to 'safer' inland regions. This book demonstrates, quite astonishingly, that the Raj cynically encouraged the exodus and contributed to the repeated cycles of rumour, panic and flight.

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