By Bapsy Jain
Rs 478
Lucky Boyce flees to New York from Bombay after the breakup of her disastrous marriage to a glamorous but controlling husband. As she moves toward enlightenment, Lucky’s thwarted by ever more bizarre roadblocks: she is mugged, framed for murder, robbed, gets pregnant, ad infinitum, all interspersed with descriptions of visions and prophetic dreams, putting her somewhere between Job and Bridget Jones. Though Lucky herself is a fully imagined, flawed but endearing character, the constant reliance on luck to shape the plot combined with a disappointing ending make this a mediocre read at best.
A Most Wanted Man
By Le Carre
Rs 472
When boxer Melik Oktay and his mother, both Turkish Muslims living in Hamburg, take in a street person calling himself Issa they set off a chain of events implicating intelligence agencies from three countries. Issa, who claims to be a Muslim medical student, is, in fact, a wanted terrorist and the son of Grigori Karpov. The book works best in its depiction of the rivalries besetting even post-9/11 intelligence agencies that should be allies, but none of the characters is as memorable as George Smiley or Magnus Pym. Still, even a lesser le Carré effort is far above the common run of thrillers.
The Blue Note Book
By James A Levine
Rs 400
Levine, a doctor at the Mayo clinic, was inspired to write this heartbreaking and terrifying novel when he was interviewing homeless children in Mumbai as part of his medical research. In the “Street of Cages” where child prostitutes ply their trade, literally encaged by their neglectful and abusive overseers, Levine was struck by the sight of a young girl sitting outside her cage writing in a notebook. Batuk is a 15 year old girl who was sold to Mamaki Briila by her father when she was 9. While painful to read, Batuk’s story puts a face on the mistreatment and disregard for children worldwide, as well as a testament to the hopefulness and power of literacy.
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