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You are here: oxfordbookstore.com » Books » Choice of the Week
 

Choice of the Week  
 

Summertime
by J M Coeetze

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'. Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others.
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Electric Feather : Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories
edited by Ruchir Joshi

In this motley antholgy of erotic stories, Ruchir Joshi brings together different facets of sexual love through the writings of celebrated contemporary Indian authors.  Filling in the dearth of good erotic writing in the Indian subcontinent, the anthology reaches out to the matured Indian audience. Read the back jacket description for a better understanding :

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The Enchantress of Florence
by Salman Rushdie

A tall, yellow-haired, young European traveler calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the Emperor Akbar, lord of the great Mughal empire, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the imperial capital, a tale about a mysterious woman, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, and her impossible journey to the far-off city of Florence.
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Nine Lives: IN SEARCH  OF THE SACRED  IN INDIA
by William Dalrymple

A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her middle-class family in Calcutta, and her job in a jute factory, only to find unexpected love and fulfilment living as a Tantric skull feeder in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes, for two months of the year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as a deity; then, at the end of February each year, he returns to prison.

An illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4,000-line sacred epic that he, virtually alone, still knows by heart. A devadasi - or temple prostitute - initially resists her own initiation into sex work, yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling.

Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerising, and told with an almost biblical simplicity, William Dalrymple's first travel book in over a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the region's rapid change.
    
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A Better India, a Better World
by N R Narayana Murthy

With one of the highest GDP growth rates in the world and an array of recent achievements in technology, industry and entrepreneurship, India strides confidently towards the future. But, in the world's largest democracy, not everyone is equally fortunate. More than 300 million Indians are still prey to hunger, illiteracy and disease, and 51 per cent of India's children are still undernourished.

What will it take for India to bridge this great divide? When will the fruits of development reach the poorest of the poor, and wipe the tears from the eyes of every man, woman and child, as Mahatma Gandhi had dreamt? And how should this, our greatest challenge ever, be negotiated?
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Simply Fly
by Captain G.R. Gopinath

This is the journey of a boy born in a remote village, who went from riding a bullock cart to owning an airline, a journey of an entrepreneur who built India\'s first and largest low-cost airline Filled with rich anecdotes of everyday struggles and joys, this is the awe-inspiring story of Captain G.R. Gopinath. This autobiography narrates in gritty detail Captain Gopinath\'s incredible journey: quitting the Indian Army in the late 1970s with a princely gratuity of Rs 6500, going back to his farm land inundated by the river, converting a piece of barren land to set up a farm for ecologically sustainable silkworm rearing, winning the Rolex award for it, his loves and passions, his extraordinary determination to launch an airline (which touched a crazy market cap of US$ 1.1 billion in less than four years ), in the process rewriting aviation history.

About the Author:
Captain G.R. Gopinath is the founder and chairman and managing director of Deccan 360, India’s new logistics company which began operations in May 2009. Prior to incubating Deccan 360, Captain Gopinath had set up Air Deccan, India’s first low-cost airline in 2003. Air Deccan went on to revolutionize Indian aviation with its ‘no frill’ business model that tightly controlled costs and offered affordable airfares to the Indian people, enabling millions of first-time fliers. Within three years Air Deccan’s operations spanned over sixty-five destinations including dozens of unconnected cities, with a reach that extended beyond even the state-owned Indian Airlines. Captain Gopinath lives in Bangalore with his wife and two daughters.
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