On The Shelf

Longform Annual: An Anthology of Graphic Narratives

HarperCollins | Pages: 400 | Rs. 1,499

This is an eclectic anthology of everything graphic from India and abroad, from one-page cartoons to mini-graphic novels, including works of French comic artist Marine Blandin, Iranian graphic designer Parsua Bashi, an excerpt from Bhutanese artist Pema Tshering’s Garpa: The Attendant, Prakash Moorthy’s free-flowing If In The Shadows A Leopard and many more.

Stephen King

The Outsider | Hachette | Pages: 475 | Rs 699

A young boy is brutally raped and murdered. Eye-witnesses, fingerprints, DNA points towards the city’s football coach. But he has an ironclad alibi—he is in another town; he’s even on TV at the time of the crime. The premise is intriguing: how can one man be in two places at the same time? But when the king of creeps veers off to the supernatural from police procedural, the plot thins.

David Darling, Agnijo Banerjee

Weird Maths: At the Edge of Infinity and Beyond | HarperCollins | Pages: 267 | Rs. 499

Mathematician David Darling teams up with his protege Agnijo Banerjee (who has an IQ of 162, the highest the Mensa test can measure) to come up with fascinating insights into chaos theory, random numbers and geometrical patterns. Maths is not something the early man needed to hunt or gather, yet our minds dev­eloped to solve complex equations; the authors try to find out why.