India Memoir

A schoolteacher who killed multiple paramours with cyanide; a mother who trained her daughters to kill children; a thug from the 1800s who slaughtered more than 900 people, a manservant who killed girls and devoured their body parts. If you thought serial killers was a Western phenomenon, think again! These bone-chilling stories in The Deadly Dozen will take you into the hearts and heads of India's most devious murderers and schemers, exploring what made them kill and why.

Driving terrified me; I hadn't done it in a decade. But if I could drive in India, I could drive anywhere. If I drive a tuk-tuk, I could drive anything. And if I said yes, I'd get to spend 10 days with her. Would that be enough time to find out who she was, what she wanted, and then convince her to abandon that and want me instead? There was only one way to find out.

Thrissur, on the coast of Kerala, is known as India's 'gold town'. It was here that Puthussery Alukka Joseph Varghese moved into jewellery retail from his umbrella business in the late 1950s. One of his ­fifteen children, Joy Alukkas, seemed to have inherited his father's entrepreneurial spirit. In 1986, the quest for his personal El Dorado took Joy to the modern 'city of gold': Dubai.

Kept: An American Househusband in India is a hilarious, heart-warming tale of a company man turned trailing spouse when his wife gets his dream job and drags him halfway around the globe. World travelers and armchair tourists alike will marvel as Greg and Dana dine with royalty, smash an immigrant smuggling ring, flee angry mobs, foil a terrorist plot, and survive a Russian rocket assault. When they adopt an Indian girl, Greg embarks on an altogether new career, and India becomes a part of their lives forever.

An African American woman doctor, fresh from her residency training in 1975, Dr. Cornelia Davis chose a less traveled path, a decision that would have profound global ramifications In a historic endeavor by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox, a disease that had tormented humanity for millennia, Davis was thrust into the heart of India. There, she confronted deeply ingrained sexism and caste discrimination while relentlessly hunting for the last vestiges of this brutal illness.

Alexander Frater spent the first six years of his life on a South Pacific island, where his father, the only doctor within a thousand square miles, encouraged his fascination with and respect for the volatile play of the elements. Frater brings this heritage to his observations on the monsoon, following it from its burst on the beaches of Trivandrum through Delhi and Calcutta, across Bangladesh, to its finale in the town of Cherrapunji, the "wettest place on Earth".

First-hand reports of the most riveting anti-terror encounters in the wake of the 2016 surgical strikes, the men who hunted terrorists in a magical Kashmir forest where day turns to night, a pair of young Navy men who gave their all to save their entire submarine crew, the Air Force commando who wouldn't sleep until he had avenged his buddies, the tax babu who found his soul in a terrifying Special Forces assault on Pakistani terrorists, and many more. Their own stories, in their own words. Or of those who were with them in their final moments.

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was an established Urdu short story writer and a rising screenwriter in Bombay at the time of India's partition in 1947, and he is perhaps best known for the short stories he wrote following his migration to Lahore in newly formed Pakistan. Ayesha Jalal draws on Manto's stories, sketches, and essays, as well as a trove of his private letters, to present an intimate history of partition and its devastating toll.

When Bhagat Singh was executed by the British after a sham trial for his involvement in the Lahore Conspiracy Case at the age of 23, he was glorified by the Indians as a martyr for his youth, his defiance and his reckless bravery. It was only many years later, after Independence in 1947, that his writings came to light. Today, it is these that set Bhagat Singh apart and reveal him as not just a hot-headed revolutionary who believed in the cult of the bomb but a widely-read intellectual inspired by the writings of Marx and Lenin.

Fanatical about cricket since he was a boy, Miles Jupp would do anything to see his heroes play. But perhaps deciding to bluff his way into the press corps during England's Test series in India wasn't his best idea. By claiming to be the cricket correspondent for BBC Scotland and getting a job with the (Welsh) Western Mail, Miles lands the press pass that will surely be the ticket to his dreams. Soon, he finds himself in cricket heaven - drinking with David Gower and Beefy, and sharing bar room banter with Nasser Hussain.

In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs. Exiled to England, the dispossessed Maharajah transformed his estate at Elveden in Suffolk into a Moghul palace. Sophia, god-daughter of Queen Victoria, was raised a genteel aristocratic Englishwoman: presented at court, afforded grace-and-favour lodgings at Hampton Court Palace and photographed wearing the latest fashions for the society pages. But when, in secret defiance of the British government, she travelled to India, she returned a revolutionary.

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments - his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor.

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages. Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years.

Kristin Dickerson left her 15-year career as a TV journalist to answer a divine calling heard in the middle of a newscast: “You’re doing this wrong.” In that moment, she realized she had a platform to share the best of humanity, but on that day, she was sharing the worst. Seven months later, she and her husband, Peter, left their jobs and donated most of their belongings to go on a pilgrimage to some of the holiest places in the world. This book is the journal Kristin wrote during their travels. It is also her testimony, which shares stories about her journey back to God.

La primera autobiografía completa y en primera persona de Carlos Alberto "El Indio" Solari (Paraná, 1949), fundador junto con Skay Beilinson de Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota. Mediante el recorrido de su vida y una obra (sus influencias y sus temas) que lo convirtió en icono de la escena contracultural del rock argentino, nos acercamos al contenido de sus letras y sus melodías, sus ídolos, la relación con su público y con la prensa (su renuencia a aparecer en medios masivos), con sus compañeros de bandas y también con los músicos de su generación.

Gandhi's nonviolent struggles against racism, violence and colonialism in South Africa and India had brought him to such a level of notoriety and adulation that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself. He feared the enthusiasm for his ideas tended to exceed a deeper understanding of his quest for truth rooted in devotion to God.

Never Cheat a Holy Man is my memoir about the three enlightening adventure-filled years in the mid-60s when my family and I lived in East Pakistan. As "memsahib", my job was to supervise a Muslim all-male household workforce. When the cook warmed the toast in his armpits and chilled the chicken in the refrigerator - still alive, I realized I was not communicating adequately. I acquired new skills mediating between cook and laundryman who were at constant odds.

In Sisters of Mokama, Jyoti Thottam draws upon 20 years’ worth of research to tell this inspiring story of six intrepid Kentucky nuns, their journey to build a hospital in the poorest state in India, and the Indian nurses whose lives would never be the same.

In 2010, just as the Indian government was stepping up its counterinsurgency operations in the country's Naxal-affected areas, Alpa Shah set out on a seven-night march with a guerrilla platoon across 250 kilometres of the same territory. An anthropology professor, she wanted to understand why, against the backdrop of a shiny new India, the country's poor had shunned the world's largest democracy and united with revolutionary ideologues.

In this concluding volume of the Savarkar series, exploring a vast range of original archival documents from across India and outside it, in English and several Indian languages, historian Vikram Sampath brings to light the life and works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the most contentious political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century.