Jinnah India-Partition Independence
by Jaswant Singh

The partition of India, 1947, some call it vivisection as Gandhi had, has without doubt been the most wounding trauma of the twentieth century. It has seared the psyche of four plus generations of this subcontinent. Why did this partition take place at all? Who was/is responsible -- Jinnah? The Congress party? Or the British? Jaswant Singh attempts to find an answer, his answer, for there can perhaps not be a definitive answer, yet the author searches. Jinnah’s political journey began as ‘an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity’ (Gopal Krishna Gokhale), yet ended with his becoming the ‘sole spokesman’ of Muslims in India; the creator of Pakistan, the Quaid-e-Azam: How and why did this transformation take place?      Read more...

The Hindus
by Wendy Doniger

From one of the world's foremost scholars on Hinduism, a vivid reinterpretation of its history. An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world?s oldest major religions, The Hindus elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds. Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account: many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated even within a century; its central tenets - karma, dharma ... Wendy Doniger is one of the foremost scholars of Hinduism in the world.
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Money and the Law of Attraction
by Esther & Jerry Hicks

This Leading Edge work by Esther and Jerry Hicks, who present the teachings of the Non-Physical consciousness Abraham, explains that the two subjects most chronically affected by the powerful Law of Attraction are financial and physical well-being. This book will shine a spotlight on each of the most significant aspects of your life experience and then guide you to the conscious creative control of every aspect of your life, and also goes right to the heart of what most of you are probably troubled by: money and physical health. Not having enough money or not having good health puts you in the perfect position for creating more of that which you do not have. This book has been written to deliberately align you with the most powerful law in the universe—the Law of Attraction—so that you can make it work specifically for you.
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Too Much Happiness
by Alice Munro

Brilliantly paced, lit with sparks of danger and underlying menace, these are dazzling, provocative stories about Svengali men, and radical women who outmanoeuvre them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments which change or haunt a life. Alice Munro takes on complex, even harrowing emotions and events, and renders them into stories that surprise, amaze and shed light on the unpredictable ways we accommodate to what happens in our lives. Munro’s unsettling stories turn lives into art, expand our world and our understanding of the strange workings of the human heart.
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The Palace of Illusions
by Chitra Banerji Divakaruni

A reimagining of the world-famous Indian epic, the Mahabharat--told from the point of view of the wife of an amazing woman. Relevant to today's war-torn world, "The Palace of Illusions" takes us back to a time that is half history, half myth, and wholly magical. Narrated by Panchaali, the wife of the legendary Pandavas brothers in the Mahabharat, the novel gives us a new interpretation of this ancient tale.
The novel traces the princess Panchaali's life, beginning with her birth in fire

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The Idea of Justice
by Amartya Sen

This major philosophical work, by one of the world's leading public intellectuals, constructs a new theory of justice, not from abstract ideals or notions of what perfect institutions and rules might be, but from what the results of a system are practically, in the world. It highlights the importance of public reasoning and argues that a system of justice should require the agreement not just of the community which is making laws, but of outsiders who might be affected, or who might have valuable perspectives to offer. The methods and conclusions of the book have implications for many different fields of intellectual activity, not only those connected with justice. It is the most ambitious and wide-ranging book Amartya Sen has yet written.
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Some Inner Fury
by Kamala Markandaya

Kamala Markandaya’s Some Inner Fury is the story of Mirabai, a young woman from a partly Westernized Hindu family in pre-Independent India. Previously confident of her place in society and her love for her country, Mira begins to question beliefs when her brother Kit returns from Oxford bringing with him a new lifestyle and his friend Richard. Mira’s love for Richard grows as the country’s agitation against the British gains intensity. Caught in the crossfire are Kit, now a district magistrate, his wife Premala and Govind, Kit’s and Mira’s adoptive brother, who is rumoured to be the mastermind behind the anti-British violence..
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Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2009, Wolf Hall is set in the 1520s and tells the story of Thomas Cromwell's rise to prominence in the Tudor court.  Hilary Mantel has been praised by critics for writing ‘a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell.'

James Naughtie, comments ‘Hilary Mantel has given us a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century.  Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail.
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The Confession of Sultana Daku
by Sujit Saraf

7 July 1924. Sultana Daku, notorious leader of a gang of bhantu dacoits that terrorized the towns and villages of the United Provinces, awaits Lt. Col. Samuel Pearce’s arrival in Haldwani jail.

It is Sultana’s last night. In the morning he will be hanged.

Wrapped in a haze of charas and nostalgia, the daku speaks all night as the Englishman listens. He recounts tales of incredible feats and narrow escapes, of the camaraderie he shared with his bhantu companions, of his love for the nautanki dancer Phulkanwar, and of the shocking betrayal that brought him to the gallows.
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The Difficulty of Being Good
by Gurcharan Das

In his new book, Gurcharan Das turns to the Mahabharata in order to answer the question, ‘why be good?’, and discovers that the epic’s world of moral haziness and uncertainty is closer to our experience as ordinary human beings than the narrow and rigid positions that define most debatein this fundamentalist age of moral certainty.
 The Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma—in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero falters, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. The epic’s characters are flawed, but their incoherent experiences throw light on our familiar dilemmas.
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