The Unseeing Idol Of Light

One fateful day, Deepti vanishes mysteriously. Baffled by her disappearance and consumed with grief, Prakash, her husband, loses his eyesight. For Prakash, the inexplicable loss of his wife is doubly painful because she was pregnant with their child. And no amount of consolation can bring him solace in the years that ensue. Into this void steps Rajani, a woman with a tormented past. Despite her initial disdain of Prakash, she steadily finds herself drawn to him. And although an intense desire brings them together, Prakash is unable to give Rajani the love she craves just as he is powerless to dispel the luminous memory of Deepti. But where will this grave obsession lead? The Unseeing Idol of Light is a haunting tale that explores love and loss, blindness and sight, obsession and suffering-and the poignant interconnections between them.

Young and impressionable, Prema is deeply infatuated with Yudas, the enigmatic man who dredges corpses from the bottom of the nearby lake. Longing to be rescued from the tyranny of her father, a former policeman who zealously tortured Naxalite rebels during the Emergency, Prema dreams of escape and finds herself drawn to the Naxal political ideology. Convinced that Yudas was one of the inmates at her father’s prison camp, Prema believes that only he can save her. But Yudas is haunted by secrets of his own and, like his biblical namesake Judas Iscariot, bears the burden of crushing guilt.

The Grddha Mullick family bursts with marvellous tales of hangmen and hangings in which they figure as eyewitnesses to the momentous events that have shaped the history of the subcontinent. When twenty-two-year-old Chetna Grddha Mullick is appointed the first woman executioner in India, assistant and successor to her father, her life explodes under the harsh lights of television cameras. When the day of the execution arrives, will she bring herself to take a life? Meera’s spectacular imagination turns the story of Chetna’s life into an epic and perverse coming-of-age tale. The lurid pleasures of voyeurism and the punishing ironies of violence are kept in agile balance as the drama hurtles to its inevitable climax.

Science fiction-roman.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

First published in 1927 and set in the 17th century, this is a wonderful story of witchcraft in the forests of England.

This early work by Edith Wharton was originally published in 1932 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Gods Arrive' is a sequel to 'Hudson River Bracketed' in which the characters, Halo and Vance, try to continue their literary relationship. Edith Wharton was born in New York City in 1862. Wharton's first poems were published in Scribner's Magazine. In 1891, the same publication printed the first of her many short stories, titled 'Mrs. Manstey's View'. Over the next four decades, they - along with other well-established American publications such as Atlantic Monthly, Century Magazine, Harper's and Lippincott's - regularly published her work.

PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE IS PROUD TO PUBLISH ANTI-CLOCK, WINNER OF THE O.V. VIJAYAN AWARD AND THIKKURISSI AWARD 'A philosophical novel that discusses the mysterious problems of life and death' BENYAMIN '"Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time's carcass." V.J. James's novel Anti-Clock has given an extremely creative twist to these words by Karl Marx' O.V. VIJAYAN PRIZE Hendri, the coffin maker, has one goal in life: to see the dead body of his nemesis Satan Loppo being lowered into the coffin he has painstakingly carved. For it was Loppo who defiled his beloved Beatrice, and let loose his hellhound Hitler upon Hendri, giving him a permanent limp. From inside his coffin shop, Hendri watches the world go by even as he prepares to deliver justice upon Loppo. He is confronted by the son of his best friend becoming enamoured with Loppo's wealth, Loppo's evil designs towards the hills of Aadi Nadu, and his own Christian guilt that regularly comes to haunt him. Until he meets Pundit, a 112-year-old watchmaker who was part of Bose's Indian National Army and is building an 'Anti-Clock', which can turn back time. When Loppo too hears of the Anti-Clock and desires to possess it, the inevitable battle becomes a reality.

The Angel's Beauty Spots' is a disquieting story about Angela's repeated infidelities and the trauma of failed love; in 'And Forgetting the Tree, I...' Radhika tries to come to terms with a former love that refuses to leave her; and 'The Deepest Blue' uses magic and metaphor to tell the story of a wife who yearns for a love that transcends lifetimes.