Sneha Mathan
1) Skywatcher
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Tamen longs to see the stars, but none are visible in the light-polluted sky above the fire escape of his urban apartment building. Even in the neighborhood park, the stars are hidden by city lights. This is a story about love and sacrifice: Tamen's mom, a night-shift nurse, finds a way to take him camping. For one magical night on the shore of a wilderness pond, the Milky Way in all its glory belongs to them.
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"India, 1922: It is rainy season in the lush, remote Satara mountains southeast of Bombay, where the kingdom of Satapur is tucked away. A curse seems to have fallen upon Satapur's royal family, whose maharaja died of a sudden illness shortly before his teenage son was struck down in a tragic accident. The kingdom is now ruled by an agent of the British Raj on behalf of Satapur's two maharanis, the dowager queen and the maharaja's widow. The royal...
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"India, 1922: Perveen Mistry is the only female lawyer in Bombay, a city where child mortality is high, birth control is unavailable and very few women have ever seen a doctor. Perveen is attending a lavish fundraiser for a new women's hospital specializing in maternal health issues when she witnesses an accident. The grandson of an influential Gujarati businessman catches fire-but a servant, his young ayah, Sunanda, rushes to save him, selflessly...
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Tiger at midnight volume 1
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English
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"Esha lost everything in the royal coup-and as the legendary rebel known as the Viper, she's made the guilty pay. Now she's been tasked with her most important mission to date: taking down the ruthless General Hotha. Kunal has been a soldier since childhood. His uncle, the general, has ensured that Kunal never strays from the path-even as a part of Kunal longs to join the outside world, which has only been growing more volatile. When Esha and Kunal's...
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The happy, middle-class world of Mahmoud and his wife, Fereiba, implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, is murdered by the new fundamentalist regime. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba will face an impossible choice.
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"A young woman comes of age in 1960s- and 1970s-era Bombay, a vanished world that is complex and indelibly rendered. Vidya's childhood is marked by the shattering absence and then the bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home. Restless, observant, and longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya navigates the stifling expectations of her life with a vivid imagination until one day...
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"A sweeping, emotional journey of two childhood friends--one struggling to survive the human slave trade and the other on a mission to save her--two girls whose lives converge only to change one fateful night in 1993. India, 1986: Mukta, a ten-year-old girl from the lower caste Yellamma cult of temple prostitutes has come of age to fulfill her destiny of becoming a temple prostitute. In an attempt to escape this legacy that binds her, Mukta is transported...
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"'I am Rani Jindan, Mother of the Khalsa. That is my identity. That is my fate.' Daughter of the royal kennel keeper, the beautiful Jindan Kaur went on to become Maharaja Ranjit Singh's youngest and last queen; his favourite. She became regent when her son Dalip, barely six years old, unexpectedly inherited the throne. Sharp-eyed, stubborn, passionate, and dedicated to protecting her son's heritage, Jindan distrusted the British and fought hard to...
11) Oleander girl
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English
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Enjoying a sheltered childhood with adoring grandparents but troubled by the silence surrounding her parents' deaths, 17-year-old Korobi is prompted by a love note among her mother's possessions and a fiance's shattering revelation to travel from India to post-September 11 America in search of her true identity.
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Taj Mahal trilogy volume 1
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English
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An enchanting historical epic of grand passion and adventure, this debut novel tells the captivating story of one of India's most controversial empresses, a woman whose brilliance and determination trumped myriad obstacles and whose love shaped the course of the Mughal Empire. Skillfully blending the textures of historical reality with the rich and sensual imaginings of a timeless fairy tale, The Twentieth Wife sweeps listeners up in Mehrunnisa's...
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In 1930, a great ocean wave blots out a Bengali village, leaving only one survivor, a young girl. As a maidservant in a British boarding school, Pom is renamed Sarah and discovers her gift for languages. Her private dreams almost die when she arrives in Kharagpur and is recruited into a secretive, decadent world. Eventually, she lands in Calcutta, renames herself Kamala, and creates a new life rich in books and friends. But although success and even...
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Poor and illiterate, Bhima had faithfully worked for the Dubash family, an upper-middle-class Parsi household, for more than twenty years. Yet after courageously speaking the truth about a heinous crime perpetrated against her own family, the devoted servant was cruelly fired. The sting of that dismissal was made more painful coming from Sera Dubash, the temperamental employer who had long been Bhima's only confidante. A woman who has endured despair...
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"A beautiful, powerful new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of Sister of My Heart and The Mistress of Spies about three generations of mothers and daughters who must discover their greatest source of strength in one another--a masterful, brilliant tale of a family both united and torn apart by ambition and love. The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, India, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but her family's situation means...
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"In life you never get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate. A business empire worth ten billion dollars. This is the tantalizing offer made by Vinay Mohan Acharya, one of India's richest men, to Sapna Sinha, a simple salesgirl in an electronics store in downtown Delhi. She can be the next CEO of his incredibly huge and profitable company. There is only one catch--she needs to pass seven tests from the "textbook of life." Thus begins the most...
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"In 2016, the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri published In Other Words, the story of her quest to learn Italian, which involved moving with her family to Italy to immerse herself fully in her adopted language. The book builds on that account through eight essays that reflect her early career as a translator. One essay uses her teaching of the Echo and Narcissus myth to reflect on the meaning of translation; another describes her decision to translate her own...
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"Thrity Umrigar has an uncanny ability to look deeply into the human heart and find the absolute truth of our lives. The Story Hour is stunning and beautiful. Lakshmi and Maggie will stay with readers for a very long time." — Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Hummingbird's Daughter
From the critically beloved, bestselling author of The World We Found and The Space Between Us, whom the New York Times Book Review
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