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The Financial Expert
The Financial Expert Margayya is a complex and entrancing character with a flair for those fabulously involved minor financial transactions which are an integral part of Indian life. We first met him sitting in the shade of a banyan tree, advising the people of Malgudi how to extract loans from the Co-operative Bank. A brush with the Secretary of the Bank, and an accident in which his spoilt son Balu throws his account book down a drain, cut short his career as a financier; but after a series of amusing incidents Margayya grows rich and reverts to financial wizardy. Apart from the vigor of the narrative, what is remarkable about the book is the unselfconscious ease and humour with which R K Narayan conveys the flavor of Indian life.
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Mr. Sampath: The Printer Of Malgudi
Mr. Sampath: The Printer Of Malgudi Weekly publications of The Banner is entirely due to two dedicated Malgudi inhabitations: Srinivas edits the newspaper, while Mr. Sampath prints it. They work night and day to satisfy the increasing demands of their clamouring public. In rare moments of relaxation, Srinivas occupies his mind puzzling over the futility of human existence, while Mr. Sampath good-naturedly shoulders all the financial burdens. Without warming, The Banner suddenly folds. Never a character to be foiled for long, Mr. Sampath becomes involved with Sunrise Productions and ropes in Srinivas to write the film scripts. Unfortunately the glamorous life goes to Mr. Sampath's head and chaos ensues. At times amusing, unfailingly perspicacious, R K Narayan has written a story of great distinction and charm.
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Waiting For The Mahatma
Waiting For The Mahatma Sriram is twenty. As a mark of his coming of age his grandmother allows his the pass-book to his savigns in the local bank, but Sriram is growing up in other ways, too, and an enchanting and unpredictable girl leads him into the entourage of Mahatma Gandhi. These are the opening events in R K Narayan's novel. It is the finest thing he has yet achieved, and his story of the triumphs and tragedies of a raw young zealot in the service of Gandhi is distinguished for its warmth, its humour, its lack of sentimentality and the stamp of absolute truth. Sriram's evolution into manhood is, for him, strange and bewildering process. Bharati, the girl he worship, is witty, infuriating, capable and, wonder of wonders, condescending to the moonstruck Sriram. Her first loyalty though, is to the Mahatma, a saint blessed with disconcerting common sense, a man whose tragedy is tat he is so much greater than his followers. Most of them accept his ideas enthusiastically, and without realizing it, pervert them to suit their coarser personalities. Sriram is inspired by Gandhi, but he is too easily influenced by glamorous patriots of the type of Jagadish, a terrorist. It is a tale of remarkable insight into the upsrge of Indian nationalism as witnessed through the eyes and hearts of Sriram and Bharati, and told with the all genius and compassion we have come to expect from R K Narayan.
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The World Of Nagraj
The World Of Nagraj Nagaraj's world is quite and comfortable. Living in his family's spacious house with only his wife Sita for company, he fills his day writing letters, drinking coffee, doing some leisurely book-keeping for his friend Coomar's Boeing Sari Company, and sitting on his veranda watching the world and planning the book he intends to write about the life of the great sage Narada. But everything is disturbed when Tim, the son of his ambitious landowing brother Gopu, decides to leave home and come to live with Nagaraj. Forced to take responsibility for the boy, puzzled by his secret late-night activities and by the strong smell of sprits which lingers behind him, Nagaraj finds his days, suddenly filled with unwelcome complication and turbulence, which threaten to alter for ever the contented tranquility of his world. The latest of R.K.Narayan's magnificent Malgudi books, The World of Nagaraj is beautifully written, funny and haunting , evoking in marvelously rich detail the atmosphere of a small town in southern India and creating a magical world into which the reader is instantly drawn....
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The Man-Eater Of Malgudi
The Man Eater Of Malgudi This is the story of Nataraj, who earns his living as a printer in the enchanted world of Malgudi, that slumbering Southern Indian village whose peace has been often amusingly and outrageously disturbed by Narayan. Nataraj and his close friends, a poet and a journalist, find their congenial days disturbed when Vasu, a powerful taxidermist; moves in with his stuffed hyenas and pythons, and brings his dancing women up the printer's private stairs. When Vasu, in search of larger game, threatens the life of a temple elephant that Nataraj has befriended, complications ensue that are both comic and calamitous. A not unwelcome death occurs; murder is suspected and Nataraj and his friends point guilty fingers at each other and those around them. The suspense never slackens in this bizarre, yet moving tale.
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Under The Banyan Tree And Other Stories
Under The Banyan Tree And Other Stories A delightful collection from India's foremost storyteller, Under the Banyan Tree adds twenty-eight tales of the rich and colorful heritage of R K Narayan's fictional south Indian city, Malgudi. Narayan's characters, observed with a wry and compassionate eye, come from every area of Indian society - merchants, beggars, herdsmen, hermits, teachers, rogues - and represent in miniature a wealth of human experience. A rebellious young man refuses to honour a vow made by his parents in an ancestral temple long ago in Nitya. A shopkeeper is made bankrupt by a charming stranger in A Career. In other tales, a schoolteacher indulges for one traumatic day in the luxury of telling the truth; a nervous small boy, forced to sleep alone to prove his courage, catches a burglar; a browbeaten clerk triumphs over his stars, and a ghost is laid to rest. Outstanding in this superb book is the masterpiece A Horse and Two Goats, drawn from a collection now no longer available, and the marvelous title story, about the divine gift of storytelling itself. Like the storyteller in Under the Banyan Tree, R K Narayan is an enchanter, a weaver of words who keeps his audience spellbound with the rhythms and haunting images of his tales. Drawn from the market-place, the mountainside, the dusty street, the river bank, these gentle, ironic, finely observed stories of village and city life demonstrate the power of fiction at its best
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Talkative Man
Talkative Man In this masterpiece, India's preeminent novelist introduces a character not unlike himself, a compulsively engaging raconteur-" They call me Talkative Man. Some affectionately shorten it to TM: I have earned this title, I suppose, because I cannot contain myself. My impulse to share an experience with others is irresistible." As a young journalist struggling to establish a reputation, TM is always on the lookout for a good story. The one he shares with the reader this time is about the mysterious Dr. Rann and his effect on the people of Malgudi-a world of "small men, small schemes, big talk, and limited means," as V.S. Naipaul aptly described Narayan's enchanting city. Dr. Rann arrives in Malgudi wearing a fancy blue suit and claiming to be researching a project for the United Nations. He inveigles TM into taking him to his home on Kabir Street, where he begins an extended visit as a house-guest. TM learns through local gossip that the secrete scholar is seducing one of Malgudi's young girls, and then a large woman from Delhi arrives and relates the amazing tale of her futile attempts to reclaim the same man, her erratic, wandering husband. In the novel's hilarious and touching denouement, TM realizes that not only he but also Dr. Rann and his implacable wife are all engaged in creating fictions about themselves and their lives....
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Confessions Of A Lapdancer
Confessions Of A Lapdancer City girl by day, city stripper by night Geri Carson is fed up with life in the City. Forced to act as one the boys in order to climb the ladder of one of London's biggest investment banks, it seems however hard she tries, she's constantly sidelined - her male colleagues all get bigger bonuses and the most prestigious accounts.Struggling to keep up with an increasingly lavish lifestyle, Geri gets deeper into debt. She needs cash - and fast.A company night out leads her to a lap-dancing club. She's awestruck by how much power the girls command - and completely turned on. Forced to return to the club the next day when she leaves her purse behind, Geri is presented with an offer she can't refuse. A chance to earn £500 per night lap-dancing in one of the hottest clubs in town.At first petrified, once the lights go up, Gerry has never felt more alive. She's a natural and soon becomes intoxicated by her new job. Then she becomes involved with a millionaire client. The sex is mind-blowing. But then she discovers a seedier and scarier side to life as a lap dancer. A world where anything goes and only the strongest survive… ...
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Sisters Shobha De'
Ms De shocks India, and much of its literary set like no other writer today.' --New York Times They were beautiful, wealthy and sought after. They were sisters and they were at war. When her parents die in an air crash, Mikki Hiralal suddenly finds herself the owner of the sprawling Hiralal industrial empire. Abandoning her studies in the United States, she returns to Bombay, only to find her father's business affairs in a mess. Almost bankrupt, beset on all sides by creditors, takeover tycoons and unreliable associates, Mikki realizes there is only one person she can turn to for help--the beautiful Alisha, her father's illegitimate daughter. There is only one hitch: Alisha hates Mikki...In her new novel, set in the corrupt world of big business, Shobha De, the bestselling author of Socialite Evenings and Starry Nights, tells an engrossing story of two women who play for very high stakes, driven by ambition, lust, greed and hate....
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Blood Line
When a dead body is found in a North London flat, it seems like a straightforward domestic murder until a bloodstained sliver of X-ray is found clutched in the dead woman’s fist - and it quickly becomes clear that this case is anything but ordinary. DI Thorne discovers that the victim’s mother had herself been murdered fifteen years before by infamous serial killer Raymond Garvey. The hunt to catch Garvey was one of the biggest in the history of the Met, and ended with seven women dead. When more bodies and more fragments of X-ray are discovered, Thorne has a macabre jigsaw to piece together until the horrifying picture finally emerges. A killer is targeting the children of Raymond Garvey’s victims. Thorne must move quickly to protect those still on the murderer’s list, but nothing and nobody are what they seem. Not when Thorne is dealing with one of the most twisted killers he has ever hunted......
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The Vendor Of Sweets
At sixty Jagan is a prosperous widower, a sweet-vendor who contrives to combine handsome profits with highminded Gandhian...
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The Painter Of Signs
The Painter of Signs tells us the story Raman, a young painter of signboards, a bachelor who glories in his old-fashioned independence, whose work takes him all over Malgudi, and requires him to do business with some of the city's most important, as well as its most absurd, tradesmen. Raman is polite and businesslike with everyone - but underneath the small talk he conducts a quizzical dialogue with himself about his fellow humans and the meaning of their lives. Enter Daisy - an unlikely name for the ruthless but very attractive young woman who commissions Raman, on behalf of the population clinic she runs, to paint signs advocating two-child families. Together they travel around the neighboring country villages where Daisy preaches birth control. Raman is appalled by the hard-edged zeal she brings to her work, just as he is enthralled by her beauty and mysterious independence of spirit. They are obviously made for each other. Or are they? In this sardonic bittersweet tale of love in modern India, R. K. Narayan has created two of fiction's most endearing and unique young lovers, and an unsetting story about India at its best and worst....
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Sultry Days
On a sultry, rainy Bombay day Nisha, an impressionable teenager, meets God in the college canteen and falls in love with his ragged, bearded looks and crude, streetwise manners. God patronizingly accepts her into his 'group' and it is in this way that their long and passionate romance begins…. God's driving ambition leads him into the unreal world of pseudo poetry, art for hire and compromised journalism while Nisha lands a job in advertising. Sycophants, court jesters, whores, dirty old men, fixers, pretty boys and party girls drift in and out of their lives (and interrupt their romance!) as their careers take off with dizzying speed… And then, abruptly and harrowingly, everything about their lives goes wrong... 'Ms De shocks India, and much of its literary set like no other writer today' — New York Times...
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Nights In Rodanthe
At forty-five, Adrienne Willis must rethink her entire life when her husband abandons her for a younger woman. Reeling with heartache and in search of a respite, she flees to the small coastal town of Rodanthe, North Carolina, to tend to a friend's inn for the weekend. But when a major storm starts moving in, it appears that Adrienne's perfect getaway will be ruined -- until a guest named Paul Flanner arrives. Paul has just sold his medical practice and comes to Rodanthe to escape his own shattered past. Now, with the storm closing in, two wounded people will turn to each other for comfort - and, in one weekend, set in motion feelings which will affect the rest of their lives....