Team P&P
Every thing looks a little more green, a little more fresh, every time it rains, does it not? Often romanticized (and why not!?), monsoon makes for an ideal backdrop to leave worldly problems behind, and curl up with a book and a cup of steaming hot drink.
We bring you a list of 10 books that you can read (and buy) while enjoying the soft pitter-patter of raindrops.
1) Room by Emma Donoghue (Our price: Rs 180)
A number-one bestseller, Room was published in 2010 to ecstatic reviews around the world and quickly became a word-of-mouth sensation. It has won or been shortlisted for more than a dozen awards and has sold more than a million copies.
Room is the story of Ma and Jack. They live in a single, locked room. Five-year-old Jack loves watching TV, but he knows that nothing he sees on the screen is truly real — only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits there’s a world outside.
2) About a Boy by Nick Hornby (Price: Rs. 170)
‘How cool was Will Freeman?’
Too cool! At thirty-six, he’s as hip as a teenager. He’s single, child-free, goes to the right clubs and knows which trainers to wear. He’s also found a great way to score with women: attend single parents’ groups full of available (and grateful) mothers, all hoping to meet a Nice Guy.
Which is how Will meets Marcus, the oldest twelve-year-old on the planet. Marcus is a bit strange: he listens to Joni Mitchell and Mozart, looks after his mum and has never owned a pair of trainers. But Marcus latches on to Will – and won’t let go. Can Will teach Marcus how to grow up cool? And can Marcus help Will just to grow up?
This astonishing novel, now a modern classic, was adapted for the acclaimed 2002 film About A Boy, starring Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult. Fans of One Day by David Nicholls and Any Human Heart by William Boyd will devour this book, as will lovers of fiction everywhere.
3) American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (Price: Rs. 250)
Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to face and it takes us on a head-on collision with America’s greatest dream- and its worst nightmare.
4) God Bless You, Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut (Price: Rs. 180)
Eliot Rosewater is tortured by a fabulous inheritance he feels he does not deserve, so he devotes himself to drink, and to a life serving the dull, the ugly, the irrelevant and the useless.
This is a novel about the pleasures, pains and perversions of people and money. It is the story of a millionaire’s lunacy, the obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness of a nation.
5) Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Price: Rs. 230)
The story revolves around two people who fall in love and then suffer the harsh realities which love brings with it. It not only narrates different traits of human nature but also depicts a careful sketch of the Latin American culture of the early 20th century.
Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza are young, optimistic and cheerful. Their nature brings them closer as they fall in love. However, they are separated by several miles and to counter this distance, they use love letters and telegraph to convey their emotions. Their resistance bears fruit as they are united only to find out that they are strangers to each other and hence cannot live together.
Fermina moves on and marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a young doctor full of knowledge and a vision to eradicate cholera. Their marriage progresses through all the ups and downs while Ariza is unable to forget Fermina. He still longs for her and decides to wait. Some drastic changes in life bring both Ariza and Fermina together again, but is their love strong enough to survive this time? Can Fermina forget Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s love for her?
6) One Hundred Names by Cecilia Ahern (Price: Rs. 130)
The uplifting and thoughtful novel from the uniquely talented author. Everyone has a story to tell…
Journalist Kitty Logan’s career has been destroyed by scandal, and she now faces losing the woman who guided her and taught her everything she knew. At her mentor’s bedside, Kitty asks her – what is the one story she always wanted to write?
The answer lies in a file buried in Constance’s office: a list of one hundred names. There is no synopsis, no explanation, nothing else to explain what the story is or who these people are. The list is simply a mystery.
But before Kitty can talk to her friend, it is too late.
With everything to prove, Kitty is assigned the most important task of her life – to write the story her mentor never had the opportunity to. Kitty has to not only track down and meet the people on the list, but find out what connects them. And, in the process of hearing ordinary people’s stories, she uncovers Constance’s – and starts to understand her own…
7) Shame by Salman Rushdie (Price: Rs. 225)
Omar Khayyam Shakil had three mothers who shared everything. They shared the symptoms of pregnancy, they shared the son that they all claim to have borne on the same night. Raised at their six breasts, Omar’s mothers teach him to live a life without shame.
And it is training that proves very useful when he leaves his mothers’ fortress and makes the fateful mistake of falling in love. For he finds himself an unwitting player in an ongoing duel between the families of two men – one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure – living in a world caught between honour and humiliation, where a moment of shame could prove fatal.
8) Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (Price: Rs. 200)
Penelope Lively’s Booker Prize winning classic, Moon Tiger is a haunting story of loss and desire.
Claudia Hampton – beautiful, famous, independent, dying. But she remains defiant to the last, telling her nurses that she will write a ‘history of the world . . . and in the process, my own’. And it is her story from a childhood just after the First World War through the Second and beyond. But Claudia’s life is entwined with others and she must allow those who knew her, loved her, the chance to speak, to put across their point of view.
There is Gordon, brother and adversary; Jasper, her untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool conventional daughter; and then there is Tom, her one great love, found and lost in wartime Egypt.
9) The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Price Rs. 120)
The Lovely Bones tells the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her – her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope, humor, suspense, even joy. A phenomenal bestseller celebrated at once for its narrative artistry, its luminous clarity of emotion, and its astonishing power to lay claim to the hearts of millions of readers around the world.
10) Indigo Stories by Satyajit Ray (Price: Rs. 170)
Indigo is the mood in this new collection of stories about the supernatural, the peculiar and the inexplicable from Satyajit Ray, one of the best-loved writers of our time.
There are tales here of dark horror, fantasy and adventure along with heart-warmingly funny stories about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. In ‘Big Bill’ Tulsi Babu picks up a newly-hatched chick from a forest and brings it home only to find it growing bigger and fiercer by the day; in ‘Khagam’ a man kills a sadhu’s deadly pet snake and invites a curse which brings about horrifying changes in his bodyl and in the title story, a young executive resting in an old abandoned bungalow for a night finds himself caught up in a chilling sequence of events which occurred more than a century ago.
Indigo is a veritable trove for those who like a taste of the unusual in a story and an unexpected twist at the end.
Go ahead, what are you waiting for? 🙂 Pick up one (or two) of these and you’re set for the season!
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Happy reading 🙂
Pen and Parchment 
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