First Selection
Here is a Biblio exclusive—the first peek at Aravind Adiga’s new book, Selection Day. Adiga has been working on the book for a few years now and it’s the story of a young boy, Manjunath Kumar, a cricket prodigy from a gritty background, who goes on to achieve glory, greatness and defeat. Like cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar, Manju too achieves his street cred playing at Bombay’s Shivaji Park and there is a sequence in which Manju bowls to Sachin, who is impressed by the youngster. But like any Adiga book, this one too will magnify the underbelly of Mumbai and its cricketing world. Adiga is said to be still working on the final proof and the book is likely to come out next year.
Jupiter’s Drums
All the six authors in the shortlist of the $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature this time are of Indian origin and the books are an eclectic mix. There is Neel Mukherjee’s searing The Lives of Others, Rajkamal Jha’s dystopian She Will Build Him A City and Anuradha Roy’s stark and unflinching Sleeping on Jupiter, which made it to the Booker longlist. The other three surprising selections are K.R. Meera’s Hangwoman, about the first hangwoman in India, Akhil Sharma’s darkly comic Family Life and Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves, a stormy love story set in Kashmir.
