Anthropology Fiction

This majestic novel by the author of India Unbound is the extraordinary chronicle, rich in passion and incident, of a Punjabi family that is uprooted from its settled existence in Lyallpur by the violence of Partition and forced to flee to India. Everything is lost in the transition, but when a son is born into the family, hopes revive of rebuilding the family's fortunes, the efforts toward which mirror those of India itself as it struggles to build itself anew.

With two out of every three Americans overweight or obese, scientists are studying how excess fat changes physical and mental health, demographers are calculating how it's shortening life spans, and economists are debating the impact it has on America's productivity and global competitiveness. But how weight affects intimacy and sexuality is barely discussed. Yet, it's a question of high importance for the tens of millions of Americans who are overweight or obese and having difficulty sexually and romantically.

Set in the bathroom of an old house just before dawn on a night in June, Centuries of June is a black comedy about a man who is attempting to tell the story of how he ended up on the floor with a hole in his head. But he keeps getting interrupted by a series of suspects - eight women lying in the bedroom just down the hall. Each woman tells a story drawn from five centuries of American myth and legend in a wild medley of styles and voices.

Down market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs, and rickshaws lies a jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in one, to him they seem 1,000 miles away. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line plunges listeners deep into this neighborhood to trace the unfolding of a tragedy through the eyes of a child as he has his first perilous collisions with an unjust and complicated wider world.

It’s sweltering in Charlotte, North Carolina and Temperance Brennan, still recovering from neurosurgery following an aneurysm, is battling nightmares, migraines, and what she thinks might be hallucinations when she receives a series of mysterious text messages, each containing a new picture of a corpse that is missing its face and hands. Immediately, she’s anxious to know who the dead man is, and why the images were sent to her.

An dem Leitbande des Instinkts, woran sie noch jetzt das vernunftlose Tier leitet, musste die Vorsehung den Menschen in das Leben einführen und, da seine Vernunft noch unentwickelt war, gleich einer wachsamen Amme hinter ihm stehen. Durch Hunger und Durst zeigte sich ihm das Bedürfnis der Nahrung an; was er zu Befriedigung desselben brauchte, hatte sie in reichlichem Vorrat um ihn herum gelegt, und durch Geruch und Geschmack leitete sie ihn im Wählen. Durch ein sanftes Klima hatte sie seine Nacktheit geschont und durch einen allgemeinen Frieden um ihn her sein wehrloses Leben gesichert.

Politics of the Womb proves that there can be broken babies and breaking mothers; it rips away the romanticism around uterus transplants, warns of genetic theft and "designer babies", and points to the human element being sacrificed, as artificial reproduction uses, reuses, and recycles the woman. Pinki Virani combines investigation with analysis to question those who lead the worldwide onslaught on the woman’s womb in the name of babies, and squarely confronts what has become the business of baby-making by a chain of suppliers that manufactures on demand.