Cherie Priest - Jacaranda Literary Agency

This, Our Paradise

Srinagar, 1986. A Kashmiri Pandit family has just moved into their new home. The patriarch Papaji is a clerk in a food cooperative and his wife Byenji is a homemaker. The narrator is their eight-year-old grandson who spends his days playing cricket and climbing the tang kul in the garden. Everything is rosy till 1989. But then, propelled by ISI and the Jamaat, a secessionist movement rises and changes everything. Lolab valley, 1968. After years of prayers, a boy named Shahid is born to Zun and her husband. He grows up in a society where corruption and unemployment are rife. The trajectory of his life changes when he meets Syed Sahab ― an Islamic theologian and rabble- rouser, who wants to overthrow the Indian state. The stories of both families intertwine tragically. In both cases, the boys are at the mercy of forces much larger than them. Both lose their Kashmir, in different ways.

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.

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.