#Bookreview: Mafia Queens of Mumbai by S. Hussain Zaidi & Jane Borges

I shifted to Mumbai fourteen years back and since then it has been my home. It is a city which teaches you to fight back and become stronger. It is an extremely accepting city and it embraces you if you love it back. My husband who has spent more than two decades often told me stories of witnessing encounters and the underworld during his college days. It sounded no less than a film. But this book has set a new edge. Men as gangsters and dons is common. What makes this book intriguing is the stories of women as gangsters, drug …

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#Bookreview : Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa

This book is a tale of friendship, love, food, plights of leprosy patients and an ode to the gift of life. Sentaro was a convict who worked in a Doriyaki restaurant. After his boss passed away, his wife became the owner of the shop. The wife didn’t take much interest in the shop due to her ailing health. The sales were not high and Sentaro ran it to suffice for his needs. One day he saw an old lady,Tokue across the street admiring the cherry blossom and smiling at him. Later the lady approached him and requested for an employment to …

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#bookreveiw: A Patchwork Family by Mukta Sathe

Have you ever felt ‘meh’ after reading a book? I was left with this feeling after finishing Mukta Sathe’s debut novel, A Patchwork Family. I was looking for a short read and the title of the book intrigued me. The story started with the narrator, Ajoba( grandfather in Marathi) and his relation with his best friend. It then spins in to how a bond of friendship, love and trust develops with his best friend’s grand daughter Janaki. While the narrator talks about this beautiful bond, he sites certain misdoings of the society and the system may be to create more …

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#bookreview : Padmavati The Harlot & Other Stories by Kamala Das

Some books leave a lasting impression on your heart and make you yearn for more. This book was such which I never wanted to get over. This collection of 19 short stories is one of the best work of Das. This collection as usual is bold like any other work of Das and spans unflinchingly over themes like communalism, lust, sex, marriage, family, love, relations, et all. All the stories are extremely well researched and strictly conforms to the structure of a short story. The brevity and the tightness of the stories keep you hooked and the climax of each …

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#Bookreview: Evidence of the Affair by Taylor Jenkins Reid

What is marriage about? Is it about companionship? Is it about unwavering trust? Is it about a bond like ’till death do us apart’? Is it about respect? Is it about unconditional love? And does it come with an expiration date? All these thoughts rumbled my mind after I finished reading Taylor Jenkins Reid’s epistolary novella ” Evidence of the Affair”. One more question which perturbed me was, can a love relationship be stronger than the bonds of marriage ? Rather can it bloom without any expectations and its fragrance reinstate the faith in the purity of love for eternity? …

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