Tales from the Andamans

The Remix Of Orchid
AN Nanda
350 pages
Rs250

The author, as Ruskin Bond points out in his foreword, is a clever man. In this work of fiction, set in the Andaman Islands, he finds stories in every grain of sand on its lush beaches. There is history and everyday relationships, murder and con games, sightseeing and introspection. There is the tale of Malovika, the established author who suffers from a severe case of writer’s block, Nitish, who battles the Postal God, and many more. All of these stories explore the not-quite-natural and edge-of-rational realm that seems just out of reach of reality. Each story is distinct, but taken together, this collection, by an author who has just been awarded the Rajiv Gandhi Sadhbhavna award for popular writing for 2007, presents a view of the islands that comes only with familiarity, after many years of living and working there.

The King Of Lies
John Hart
John Murray
385 pages
Rs576

Power and greed beget many enemies, the cover says sagely, repeating a truth that is hammered home in the daily soaps on television. But add a little psychology and the situation gets irretrievably complicated. This is the story of Jackson Workman Pickens, inevitably called ‘Work’ by his friends. The work he actually does is not spectacular — he is a small town lawyer with little ambition,  and his sister is  ‘psychologically damaged’. And then, to make that difficult life even worse, Work is charged with the murder of his own father. Which is when he has to get his legal mind working overtime, for he needs to clear his name and figure out who his real enemies are. A good read, in parts.

Belong
Fazle Hasnayen
Srishti
205 pages
Rs100

There are some questions every young man wants answered as he grows up. And some of them come after a day in the sun with a beloved, like why every day is not as beautiful, what are the missing elements of our lives, and what are the things that make one feel incomplete. Divaker is, as the author says, “a common and ordinary man like one of us”. Originally from a small village in West Bengal, he finds himself learning and experiencing everything “the harder way round”. He endures tough situations in his home, work and love life. As he weathers the turbulence of life, he believes that he has missed a lot that goes into the life of a young man — inquisitiveness, curiosity, dreams. But somehow, things turn out okay…    

Ramya Sarma