Bibliofile

As timing goes, Crosswords could not have done better. February is more or less a dead month for books, with bookstores and agents returning unsold stocks before close of accounts in March. What better time for an expanding bookchain (it now has 22 bookstores across eight cities) to bring attention to books already a year or two old on the stands? As a build-up for the event, the organisers have a phone-in contest, a scaled-down version of the Big Read. For next year, they might have an award for non-fiction.

The last time, in 2000, favourite Amitav Ghosh lost to a virtually unknown debut novelist, Tibetan scholar and activist Jamyang Norbu, whose Mandala of Sherlock Holmes pipped Amitav's Glass Palace. Norbu hasn't come up with another novel since but Amitav's back in the running with Tide, the story of a man who ties himself, and his heroine, to a coconut palm as a tidal wave sweeps the Sundarbans. An eerie case of fact echoing fiction.