Archana Rao- Faber and Faber
Guest: Rights Manager, Archana Rao- Faber and Faber
Date: 22 Feb 2008
Competition Q: What is the name of the detective in Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'?
Answer: Porfiry Petrovich
Winner: Anna Gventadze, Stoke Newington
Prizes: Sponsored by Faber and Faber- R.N.Morris' 'A Gentle Axe' and 'A Vengeful Longing'
Books
A Vengeful Longing by R.N.Morris (Published by Faber & Faber)
A Vengeful Longing is the sequel to R. N. Morris's highly acclaimed A Gentle Axe,once again featuring
the brilliant detective Porfiry Petrovich from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in another gripping,
atmospheric murder story.
It is the middle of a hot, dusty St Petersburg summer in the late 1860s. A doctor's wife and son die
suddenly - and in excruciating pain. The doctor is arrested, suspected of poisoning. As investigator
Porfiry Petrovich concedes, in such cases the obvious solution often turns out to be the correct one.
And in the city's stifling, stinking atmosphere, even he lacks the energy to look any deeper. But
when further (and apparently unconnected) murders occur, something like a pattern seems to emerge.
Porfiry is forced to reassess his assumptions and follow a tenuous, uncertain trail that takes him
into the hidden, squalid heart of the city and brings him face to face with incomprehensible horror
and cruelty.
Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Heminghway
Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on
his luck, and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in
the Gulf Stream. Here Hemingway recasts the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of
personal triumph won from loss. Written in 1952, this hugely successful novella played a large part
in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.
India After Gandhi by Ramchandra Guha
Born against a background of privation and civil war, divided along lines of caste, class, language
and religion, independent India emerged, somehow, as a united and democratic country.This remarkable book tells the full story—the pain and the struggle, the humiliations and the glories—of the world's largest and least likely democracy.
Ramachandra Guha writes compellingly of the myriad protests and conflicts that have peppered the
history of free India. But he writes also of the factors and processes that have kept the country
together (and kept it democratic), defying numerous prophets of doom who believed that its poverty
and heterogeneity would force India to break up or come under autocratic rule. Once the Western
world looked upon India with a mixture of pity and contempt; now it looks upon India with fear and
admiration.
Moving between history and biography, this story of modern India is peopled with extraordinary
characters. Guha gives fresh insights on the lives and public careers of those long-serving prime
ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. There are vivid sketches of the major "provincial"
leaders whose province was as large as a European country: the Kashmiri rebel turned ruler Sheikh
Abdullah; the Tamil film actor turned politician M. G. Rama-chandran; the Naga secessionist leader
Angami Zapu Phizo; the socialist activist Jayaprakash Narayan. But the book also writes with feeling
and sensitivity about lesser known (though not necessarily less important) Indians—peasants, tribals,
women, workers and musicians.
Synopsis Courtesy of www.harpercollins.com
Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair
Meet Akhilandeshwari, Akhila for short: forty-five and single, an income-tax clerk, and a woman who
has never been allowed to live her own life - always the daughter, the sister,the aunt,the provider.
Until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari, gloriously alone
for the first time in her life and determined to break free of all that her conservative Tamil
brahmin life has bound her to.
In the intimate atmosphere of the ladies coupé which she shares with five other women, Akhila gets
to know her fellow travellers:
Janaki, pampered wife and confused mother;
Margaret Shanti, a chemistry teacher married to the poetry of elements and an insensitive tyrant too
self-absorbed to recognize her needs;
Prabha Devi, the perfect daughter and wife, transformed for life by a glimpse of a swimming pool;
Fourteen-year-old Sheela, with her ability to perceive what others cannot;
And Marikolanthu, whose innocence was destroyed by one night of lust.
As she listens to the women's stories, Akhila is drawn into the most private moments of their lives,
seeking in them a solution to the question that has been with her all her life: Can a woman stay
single and be happy, or does a woman need a man to feel complete?
www.anitanair.net
In the Fold by Rachel Cusk (Published by Faber & Faber)
The Hanburys of Egypt Hill are the last word in bohemian living - or so they like to think. Their
parties are famous, their relationships confusing, their bravado immense. To Michael, a young student
arriving at the house on the hill for Caris Hanbury's eighteenth birthday party, they represent the
prospect of relief from the strictures of conformity, and of an enfolding exuberance to which he
feels irresistibly attracted.
As an adult, Michael finds his own version of the Hanburys. The Alexanders are a wealthy, artistic
family for whom moral abandon is almost a point of honour, and their fractious daughter Rebecca is
now Michael's wife. While Rebecca struggles with questions of identity and self-expression, Michael
becomes increasingly preoccupied with the idea of virtue. Why is his life with Rebecca and their son
Hamish so destructive and tumultuous?How has his existence become so tarnished,so without principle?
When Michael is invited to spend a week with the Hanburys on Egypt Hill his illusions are startlingly
confounded. The hill is being spoiled by development; the family are riven by jealousy and deceit;
and as the days pass the rotten core of the Hanbury myth is gradually disclosed.
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk (Published by Faber & Faber)
Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of
life.Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses,its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally
do what’s expected of them.
Theirs is a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. Set
over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through
the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters’ lives: of Juliet, enraged at the
victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive
housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger;
of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose
troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents.
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Azar Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house
every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all
former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious
families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. Shy and uncomfortable
at first, they soon began to open up and speak more freely, not only about the novels they were
reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with
those they were reading - "Pride and Prejudice", "Washington Square", "Daisy Miller" and "Lolita" -
their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi's account flashes back to the early days of
the revolution when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests
and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled
faculty members and purged the curriculum. Azar Nafisi's luminous tale offers a portrait of the
Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a glimpse, from the inside, of women's lives in
revolutionary Iran.
The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merill-Block (Random House Publishing)
Abel Haggard is an elderly hunchback who haunts the remnants of his family’s farm in the encroaching
shadow of the Dallas suburbs, adrift in recollections of those he loved and lost long ago. As a
young man, he believed himself to be “the one person too many”; now he is all that remains. Hundreds
of miles to the south, in Austin, Seth Waller is a teenage “Master of Nothingness”–a prime specimen
of that gangly, pimple-rashed, too-smart breed of adolescent that vanishes in a puff of sarcasm at
the slightest threat of human contact. When his mother is diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset
Alzheimer’s, Seth sets out on a quest to find her lost relatives and to conduct an “empirical
investigation” that will uncover the truth of her genetic history. Though neither knows of the
other’s existence, Abel and Seth are linked by a dual legacy: the disease that destroys the memories
of those they love, and the story of Isidora–an edenic fantasy world free from the sorrows of
remembrance, a land without memory where nothing is ever possessed, so nothing can be lost.
Through the fusion of myth, science, and storytelling, this novel offers a dazzling illumination of
the hard-learned truth that only through the loss of what we consider precious can we understand the
value of what remains.
Coming up Next week on Book Club- Angela Young, author of 'Speaking of Love', which has been
shortlisted for the 'THE BOOK TO TALK ABOUT' Award, in ssociation with WORLD BOOK DAY - 6 March 2008. Tune in next week- the 29th Feb to win copies of 'Speaking of Love'.
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