BOOKS OF THE WEEK - 23RD JUNE, 2017


The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
By - Arundhati Roy  

----------------------------- About the Book -----------------------------
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years – the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, ‘normalcy’ is declared.
Anjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who love her.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching love story and a decisive remonstration. It is told in a whisper, in a shout, through tears and sometimes with a laugh. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, mended by love – and by hope. For this reason, they are as steely as they are fragile, and they never surrender. This ravishing, magnificent book reinvents what a novel can do and can be. And it demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts.
---------------------------- About the Author ----------------------------
Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and was a bestseller in more than thirty languages worldwide.
Since then Roy has published five books of influential non-fiction essays that include The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2001), Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), and Broken Republic (2011). She has raised profound questions about war and peace, the definitions of “violence” and “non-violence”, about what we think of as “development”, “democracy”, “nationalism”, “patriotism” and indeed the idea of civilization itself.
ISBN :  978067008963 
Price : Rs.599.00
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - 9Th June, 2017

The Ring of Truth: Myths of Sex and Jewelry
By - Wendy Doniger 

----------------------------- About the Book -----------------------------
From Shakuntala to Scheherazade to Marilyn Monroe, from Ancient India and Greece to Medieval Europe to modern cinema, sexual desire and jewelry, particularly rings, have been very often connected. Why do jewels keep appearing in stories about marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery, identity and masquerade? What is the mythology that makes finger rings symbols of true (or, as the case may be, untrue) love across the world? Wendy Doniger’s new book offers a riveting cross-cultural history of jewelry and its role in seduction, romance and infidelity. Few writers could begin with personal family anecdotes, shift to Sanskrit and Greek epics and the plays of Kalidasa and Shakespeare, make detours into fairy tales and folklore, return to Hollywood films and modern pop songs and still maintain a coherent, illuminating and supremely entertaining discussion. Yet that is precisely what Wendy Doniger accomplishes in this lively and penetrating examination of the enduring power of myth as revealed through stories about jewels, sex and clever women. The Ring of Truth, like all of Wendy Doniger’s books, is an astonishing and hugely satisfying work of scholarship rendered in compulsively readable prose.
---------------------------- About the Author ----------------------------
The author of classic works like The Hindus: An Alternative History and Hindu Myths, Wendy Doniger holds two doctorates, in Sanskrit and Indian studies, from the universities of Harvard and Oxford. She has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. Her other books include Siva: The Erotic Ascetic; Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities; The Mare’s Trap: Nature and Culture in the Kamasutra; On Hinduism; and translations of the Rig Veda and the Kamasutra.
ISBN : 9789386338860   
Price : Rs.899.00
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Email: sales@ebd.in, Phone: +91 135 2655192