A Cat Blessed It
Is it anything to do with being a high-profile director of the best-known litfest in India, or the fact that we Indians can’t resist the lure of a book with religion for its theme? Whatever be the reason, William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives has achieved a minor miracle: it sold more copies in India (35,000 in 3 months) than in the UK. Penguin, which is distributing the book in India, says that while it is by no means Dalrymple’s top seller (The Last Mughal has sold 60,000 copies in India), it is his fastest selling title. But in that race, Nandan Nilekeni is way ahead: his Imagining India sold 50,000 copies in three months.
It’s A Boy!
His ex-spouse may have delivered her baby girl, but Salman Rushdie isn’t far behind: his eleventh novel will be out end of September. Luka and the Fire of Life is a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and is about the adventures of Haroun’s younger brother, Luka. It was his elder son, Zafar, who persuaded his father to write his first children’s book, but this book is apparently for his younger son from his third wife, Elizabeth West.
Guardian Rules
For all the million Indians who seem to be working on their novels: you couldn’t do better than read the ten rules that Guardian got some of its eminent writers to come up with. My favourite: Esther Freud confessing how she broke her own rule about cutting out all metaphors and similes. She slipped up, she writes, during a sunset in chapter 11 of her first book and “I still blush when I come across it.” Another gem: “The two most depressing words in the English language are ‘literary fiction’.”
