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The Great Flap of 1942

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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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.

Accidents Happen

By F H Batacan

A short story collection as relentlessly intense and darkly compelling as Batacan’s debut, the Filipino crime landmark Smaller and Smaller Circles F.H. Batacan’s first novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles, was an instant classic when it was published in 1999, a masterpiece of Filipino crime that won the Philippine Book Award. In this, her second work of fiction, she gives us a far-ranging collection that explores the darkest corners of human experience, depicting with pitch black humor the systems of class and politics that her characters are trapped in, and the moments violence—accidental or otherwise—that can, at any moment, shatter their lives. The driver for a wealthy family witnesses the aftermath of the disappearance of the family’s twelve-year-old son. A field investigator for the World Health Organization travels the world giving presentations about a biomedical enzyme that will lead to the extinction of the human race. And Father Augusto Saenz, the Jesuit priest and forensic anthropologist from Smaller and Smaller Circles, returns to investigate the murder of a woman whose secretive life holds the key to her death. Sure to cement Batacan’s status as a crime writer of global status, Accidents Happen is a probing and relentless series of dark excursions into worlds where the smallest moments are infused with life and vibrating with menace, and death is always close at hand.