Hangwoman

‘An epic novel’—Outlook When twenty-two-year-old Chetna Grddha Mullick is appointed the first woman executioner in India, assistant and successor to her father, her life explodes under the harsh lights of television cameras. When the day of the execution arrives, will she bring herself to take a life?

Young and impressionable, Prema is deeply infatuated with Yudas, the enigmatic man who dredges corpses from the bottom of the nearby lake. Longing to be rescued from the tyranny of her father, a former policeman who zealously tortured Naxalite rebels during the Emergency, Prema dreams of escape and finds herself drawn to the Naxal political ideology. Convinced that Yudas was one of the inmates at her father’s prison camp, Prema believes that only he can save her. But Yudas is haunted by secrets of his own and, like his biblical namesake Judas Iscariot, bears the burden of crushing guilt.

Education universally is considered as an instrument of empowerment. It makes everyone aware of human rights and gives voice to voiceless. Women being one of the vulnerable communities not only in India but across the globe can leverage the medium of education for their freedom. Indian history in this scenario leads the globe when in 1848 Mahatma Phule and Savitribai Phule opened school for girl’s education, which became first such initiative specifically for women education. In this backdrop researcher would try to peek into the educational policies which start from Wood’s despatch of 1854, till the recent NEP 2020.

David Mitre finds himself the focus of attention for an assassin while helping FBI Special Agent Delia Delacorte in her latest case in Amsterdam. “It takes a thief to catch a thief . . .” The last thing fugitive crime writer David Mitre expects as he’s cruising along an Amsterdam canal is to be the focus of a bizarre murder attempt . . . But why is he being targeted? He hasn’t even done anything wrong. Recently. After the would-be assassin tries again, David is rescued by Delia Delacorte, the FBI Special Agent he locked horns with in Cyprus. In return, Delia wants his help to prevent the theft of a priceless painting from the Rijksmuseum. Meanwhile David is also attempting to find a friend’s missing daughter, allay the suspicions of the local police and evade the assassin, all the while devising a plan to stop the theft. His plan: he’ll steal the painting himself . . .

A mysterious "fear disease" is scaring to death the citizens of Longzhou, China. Literally. Victims go insane or die frozen in terror, while survivors rant maniacally about demons infiltrating the city. But what's really behind the sudden epidemic? To find the answer, Chief Inspector Luo Fei teams up with a controversial historian and a brilliant psychologist to track down the true source of the illness and halt the wave of horror that threatens the metropolis. As the trio ventures to the primitive jungles and mountains of Yunnan, they're haunted by tales of a seventeenth-century general whose demonic soul, said to have been sealed away in a vial of his blood, has been unleashed on the modern world. Now, trekking deep into the legendary Valley of Terror, they find themselves being stalked by someone--or something--daring them to uncover the truth. And as superstition, science, and history collide, their discovery could be as heart-stopping as fear itself.

‘A literary heavyweight’—Indian Express In these bold, wry and ebullient stories, Meera’s astonishing range of narrative techniques is on full display as she expertly lays bare the faultlines behind the façade of everyday life, sometimes with dark humour and sometimes with astoundingly bitter sadness.