Books

Set largely in Kalimpong in the 1980s, The Hills are Burning is centred on the life of its protagonist Tukai or Tirthankar Chatterjee, a student of Class 11, who has, following his father’s transfer, moved from Kolkata to the Darjeeling hills. It is a tense time rife with everyday violence and instability. The Gorkhaland agitation was demanding a separate state for the Gorkhas, who have a distinct cultural and linguistic identity. The conflict between Gorkhas and Bengalis from the plains has already turned bloody and…

In March 1915, public schoolboy Sidney Ellwood sends a letter to his close friend Henry Gaunt on the western front: “I am torn between wanting the War to go on so I can join you (‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!’), and wanting it to end so you can join the Ardents. Two such thrilling worlds! Aren’t we lucky?”Needless to say, Ellwood’s perspective on luck soon changes. Alice Winn’s debut novel, named after Tennyson’s elegiac poem, begins as Ellwood and Gaunt, seniors at Preshute College, are between two worlds.…

‘How should we understand a life – and where do literary, personal and intellectual biography meet?” asked Patrick French in a colloquium held last year. There was nobody better positioned to answer. A biographer of unparalleled sensitivity, Patrick learned early on “to realise the complexity of each person” and “the need for scrupulous research and selection, as well as intuition, empathy and compassion”. He will long be remembered for his literary achievements, especially his biography of VS Naipaul, which offers a…

Journalist Lizzie Dearden has been covering terrorism and extremism for about a decade. In her first book, Plotters, she looks at a series of botched terrorist attacks in the UK between 2017 and 2022, examining the attackers’ motivations and the reasons they failed. Sometimes it was down to luck: one would-be perpetrator got waylaid by a malfunctioning satnav; another mistakenly equipped his homemade bomb with acetone-free nail polish remover instead of the regular stuff, rendering it harmless. Often it was a matter of an…

Four debuts have been shortlisted for the £20,000 Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.The award is for writers aged 39 or under, and is open to all forms of literature. This year’s shortlist of six comprises three novels, two short story collections and one book of poetry.Quick GuideDylan Thomas prize shortlist ShowThank you for your feedback.Di Speirs, chair of the judges and books editor at BBC Audio, said the list exemplified “not only the talent and excitingly fresh, often startling, writing we were seeking, but…

Three years on, it remains difficult to think coherently about Covid-19 and the many ways it has changed us. A global pandemic, abstract and vast, rendered painfully real in the most intimate of ways; in freedoms curtailed, in relationships lost, in millions of bodies broken or buried. How do we tell the story of something we can’t see? Is there a legible thread that connects a set of experiences that differ so radically along lines of wealth, geography, health, politics, risk appetite and plain old dumb luck?These…

After the execution of three revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, the country was on the boil. The ongoing protests since the announcement of judgment on 7 October 1930, escalated further after the executions. As the bodies of three martyrs were not given to the families for the cremation and taken out from back gate of the jail with some accounts mentioning, in mutilated form towards Ferozepur; a number of people led by Amar Kaur, younger sister of Bhagat Singh, and Parvati Devi, daughter of Lala Lajpat…

Corruption offers rich pickings for writers. It’s something that fascinates us and, if we’re honest, we worry could seduce us. Often, what keeps corruption contained is a lack of opportunity and the fact the risks outweigh the rewards – although sometimes the risk-takers are those eschewing corruption.We British have always had a slightly superior attitude to corruption, seeing it as something endemic in other countries. We had the odd instance, such as the John Poulson scandal of the early 70s, which brought down some…

It’s no wonder Americans have failed to eliminate poverty, sociologist Matthew Desmond maintains in his new book. He believes the better-off are fighting a class war, keeping the poor down by design. Even if he shies away from some of the consequences of his explosive claim, his arguments have the potential to push debate about wealth in America to a new level.Having won a coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2015, Desmond is known for his absorbing previous book on eviction practices in housing, which netted…

“I recall that I am extremely forgetful,” announces the narrator of Percival Everett’s Dr No in the novel’s opening lines. “I believe I am. I think I know that I am forgetful. Though I remember having forgotten, I cannot recall what it was that I forgot or what forgetting feels like.” No sooner has the reader crossed the threshold of the narrative than it begins to reveal itself as a labyrinth of mirrors, an elaborate and joyously rickety construction of philosophical gags and structural paradoxes. The novel, Everett’s…