Bibliofile

By the Sixes!

The cricket World Cup is just a few strokes away, and it's raining sixes with books on ODI cricket. There is Criconomics: Everything You Wanted to Know About ODI Cricket and More, by the redoubtable Surjit Bhalla, eco­nomist and cricket fanatic, and Ankur Choudhary, number-cruncher and investment analyst. It is full of charts and graphs: 'The Best Second Innings Comebacks', 'Best Batsmen Under Stress', 'Worst Chokers' and so on. Then there is the slim The Cricket Fanatic's Essential Guide by sports anchor Vimal Kumar. This one is only about 40 years of the World Cup. It's crammed with enough info to leave even ardent quizzers satisfied.

Return of Magic

After a tough fight and complex negotiations, Penguin India has got the new Salman Rushdie title, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. This will be his first proper novel in eight years. Reports are that the magic realism of yore is back. It deals with the way we live now, blending history, mythology and love story in true Rushdie fashion, and will be in bookstores in India by September.

Nothing Matters

Czech writer Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) too will be bringing out a novel, his first in 13 years. The English translation of his French book The Festival of Ignorance will be out by June. Faber describes it as: “wryly comic yet dee­ply serious glance at the ultimate insignificance of life and politics”. In other words, vintage Kundera.