Books of The Week: Saturday, 19th of July 2025

The Greatest Game: Being the Further Adventures of Kimball O’Hara by Stephen Alter 

ABOUT THE BOOK

March 1947. India is poised on the verge of Independence and Partition. Lahore and Delhi are roiling under Jinnah’s call for direct action the previous year. Amid riots and mounting communal tension, a plan has been set afoot to assassinate Nehru—and Gandhi, if possible. And it’s up to secret agent Kimball O’Hara to foil it.

There is more mayhem that he will need to ward off. British officer Sir Denys Bromley-Pugh, a Nazi sympathizer, will stop at nothing to detonate a bomb at a Congress rally set to be addressed by Nehru. If he succeeds, instead of one, there will be dozens of partitions all over the country. Kim finds himself tangled in an elaborate game of disguise, bait, and patience to hack into Bromley-Pugh’s mind and halt the destruction of India.

In this sequel to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, award-winning author Stephen Alter brings to life an older, wiser version of the mischievous young hero. Employed by the Imperial Secret Service, Kim is a shapeshifting agent slipping in and out of disguise— Indian one moment and an English sahib the next; now a horse trader, then a sanyasi.

Visceral in its intensity, The Greatest Game is a thrilling adventure featuring an unforgettable hero during the fraught run-up to Independence in India.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Alter is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction. Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth, a work of non-fiction, received the 2020 Banff Mountain Book Award in the Mountain Environment and Natural History category. His memoir, Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime, won the Kekoo Naoroji Book Award for Himalayan Literature. In the Jungles of the Night, a novel about Jim Corbett, was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His latest work includes The Cobra’s Gaze: Exploring India’s Wild Heritage, Death in Shambles: A Hill Station Mystery, and Birdwatching: A Novel which won the 2023 Greenlitfest Book of the Year. Alter has taught at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, where he was director of the writing program for seven years. Following this, he was writer-in-residence at MIT for ten years. Among the honours he has received are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the East-West Center in Hawaii, and the Banff Centre for Mountain Culture.

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Books of the Week - 23rd April, 2022

The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality
By - Mike Sielski 

About the Book

Kobe Bryant is a legend – The Rise is a fascinating look at his early life and how he became regarded as one of basketball’s greatest ever players. Kobe Bryant’s death in January 2020 did more than rattle the worlds of sports and celebrity. It took the tragedy of that helicopter crash to reveal the full breadth and depth of Kobe’s influence, and by tracing and telling the oft-forgotten and lesser-known story of his early life, The Rise promises to provide an unparalleled insight into Kobe.In The Rise, readers travel from the cracked concrete basketball courts of Philadelphia in the 1960s and 70s - where Kobe's father, Joe, became a playground, college and professional stand out - to the majesty and isolation of Europe, where Kobe spent his formative years and to the leafy suburbs of Lower Merion, where Kobe's legend was born. The story culminates with his leading Lower Merion to the 1995-96 Pennsylvania state championship - a true underdog run for a team with just one star player, Kobe - and with the 1996 NBA draft, where Kobe's dream of playing pro basketball culminated with his acquisition by the Los Angeles Lakers.With exclusive access to a series of never-before-released interviews during Bryant's senior season and early days in the NBA. Mike Sielski's The Rise reveals insights never seen before. For a quarter-century, these tapes and transcripts preserved Kobe's thoughts, dreams and goals from his teenage years, and they contained insights into him and told stories about him that have never been revealed before.This is beyond a mere basket ball book. This is an exploration of the making of an icon and the effect of his development on those around him - the essence of the man before he truly became a man.

About the Author

Mike Sielski is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality and several other books. The Associated Press Sports Editors voted him the country’s top sports columnist in 2015, and his previous book, Fading Echoes: A True Story of Rivalry and Brotherhood from the Football Field to the Fields of Honor, was published in 2009. Sielski lives in Bucks County, Pa., with his wife and two sons.

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www.ebdbooks.com

Our mail order service ships books in India and Overseas

Email: sales@ebd.in, Phone: +91 135 2655192