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SEVENTY FOUR
₨ 395‘A post pandemic story written way before the pandemic. A haunting little book about second chances, last days and human relations that survive the unsurvivable.’ Mohammed Hanif, author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes ‘Any culture’s science fiction is its dream of what its future could be. Now we live in a global culture, and Faraz Talat’s Seventy Four shoots right to the heart of all our current fears and hopes. It’s an intense experience, poignant and memorable.’ Kim Stan Robinson, author of Blue Mars ‘Scientists become saviors in times of plague, but their attempts to exert control over pathogens and politics go awry in Faraz Talat’s science fiction novella Seventy Four. Razia Ntikoladze, eminent scientist and Pakistani emigree, is locked in a race against a deadly new contagion and her own mortality; before she can save the world, she has to escape the colloquium’s merciless eugenics project. A daringly brilliant literary experiment which pits humanity against its own worst enemy—itself.’ Bina Shah, author of Before She Sleeps
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THE WHITE CASTLE
₨ 1,095From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja–master–a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other’s most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination. Translated from the Turkish by Victoria Holbrook.
ISBN: 9780375701610
Publisher: VINTAGE BOOKS -
THE LUNAR MEN
₨ 1,070In the 1760s a group of amateur experimenters met and made friends in the English Midlands. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the center of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toymaker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor, and theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles). Later came Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen and fighting radical.
With a small band of allies they formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham (so called because it met at each full moon) and kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Blending science, art, and commerce, the Lunar Men built canals; launched balloons; named plants, gases, and minerals; changed the face of England and the china in its drawing rooms; and plotted to revolutionize its soul.
Uglow’s vivid, exhilarating account uncovers the friendships, political passions, love affairs, and love of knowledge (and power) that drove these extraordinary men. It echoes to the thud of pistons and the wheeze and snort of engines and brings to life the tradesmen, artisans, and tycoons who shaped and fired the modern age.
ISBN: 0374194408
Publisher: FARRAR -
MEFISTO
₨ 1,777Mefisto, a brilliant modern-day retelling of the Faust legend, explores the relations between science and the real world, and between the scientist and the human cost of his explorations. Gabriel Swan, a maths prodigy obsessed with the idea of order, becomes involved with the mesmerising trio formed by sad, obese Mr. Kasperl, who is like someone “from a country where no one else lived”; lovely, mute Sophie; and the Mephistophelian Felix, whose appearances always foretoken disaster. In an abandoned mansion, their changing relations, and Gabriel’s quest for a “formula that will reduce the disorder of common things to an equation,” slowly and inevitably land him in his own private season in Hell.
ISBN: 1567920977
Publisher: DAVID R. GODINE PUBLISHER₨ 3,549 -
DANCE OF THE HAPPY SHADES
₨ 995In these fifteen short stories–her eighth collection of short stories in a long and distinguished career–Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives. Virtuosity, elemental command, incisive like a diamond, remarkable: all these descriptions fit Alice Munro.–Christian Science Monitor How does one know when one is in the grip of art–of a major talent?….It is art that speaks from the pages of Alice Munro’s stories.–Wall Street Journal
ISBN: 9780679781516
Publisher: VINATGE INTERNATIONAL