Lana Sabarwal debuts with a psychological murder mystery: Maya, Dead and Dreaming, set in the 1950s US

The most striking element of Maya, Dead and Dreaming greets readers before they even turn the first page. The cover art, featuring a woman’s face half-illuminated and half-swallowed by darkness, perfectly encapsulates the novel’s central tension between truth and concealment. This visual metaphor extends throughout Sabarwal’s narrative, where characters exist in similar states of partial revelation. […]

Dileep Heilbronn: Where Ferraris and Dhotis Coexist—A Vision of Rooted Ambition

Let us begin with the first thing that compelled me to inquire about the life of this successful achiever, Dileep Heilbronn, also known as Dileep Kumar Adiyattu Valappil. It was the attractive cover of his autobiography, The Malabari Who Loved His Ferrari. Yes, the title’s resemblance to a pun is another thing. The cover of […]

Rita Chhetri’s Boy with the Red Balloon, an emphatic entrance on the horizon of Indian English Fiction

In Boy with the Red Balloon, Rita Chhetri delivers a profoundly moving narrative that traverses the fragile terrain of memory, love, childhood trauma, and human resilience. What is particularly commendable is how Chhetri—better known for her distinguished academic achievements in physics and her contributions to the nuclear industry—exhibits an intuitive command over the emotional and […]