Leela

Leela—alluring, taciturn, haunted—is moving back to Delhi from New York. She knows her return will unsettle many lives. Twenty-five years ago her sister was seduced by Vyasa, a young university lecturer. Now Vyasa, an eminent Sanskrit scholar, is preparing for the unlikely marriage of his son, Ash, to the child of a Hindu nationalist. Compounding Leela’s disruptive presence, Vyasa’s hedonistic daughter Bharati arrives from London, reluctantly leaving her cosmopolitan university life to see Ash married. He, meanwhile, has fallen in love with his brother-in-law to be. Gleefully presiding over the drama is Ganesh—divine, elephant-headed scribe of India’s great epic, the Mahabharata. The family patriarchs may think they have arranged the wedding for their own selfish ends, but according to Ganesh it is he who is directing events—in a bid to save Leela, his beloved heroine, from his devious enemy Vyasa. Turning to fiction after an award-winning travel book, Alice Albinia has written a brilliantly playful and genre-defying first novel. Ambitious and entertaining, Leela’s Book weaves a tale of contemporary Delhi that crosses religious and social boundaries, reaching back into the origins of the Mahabharata itself.

High in the Himalayas, Leela, a New Yorker, unexpectedly undertakes a terrifying yet ultimately enlightening spiritual journey into the deepest secrets of her mind. In Darjeeling, at Maharishi's ashram, under the sure guidance of the yogi master, she reaches her great realization. On her return to New York she struggles, and ultimately succeeds, in sharing the secret teachings of her vision. The novel uncovers archetypal and highly relevant spiritual teachings. East meets West in Leela helping her as Maharishi says, "To understand ancient wisdom in a modern world." Meditation and yoga offer practical paths to freedom from the often dispiriting and desperate quality of our contemporary lives. In captivating prose the novel intertwines Leela's journey with modern philosophy and primal wisdom telling a story as old as the human heart.

Leela - alluring, taciturn, haunted - is moving back to Delhi after years of exile in New York. She knows her return will disrupt precariously balanced lives. Twenty years ago her sister Meera died, taking a devastating secret with her. Now, as the family gathers for a wedding, Leela must sift truth from fiction. Meanwhile the bride's father plots political conquest, the groom realises that he has fallen in love with his brother-in-law to be, and Ganesh - elephant-headed god and scribe of India's great epic, the Mahabharata - claims both Leela and the novel as his own creation. Brilliantly playful and entertaining, Leela's Book weaves a poignant tale of contemporary life in an ancient city.

The precursor to the popular game " chutes and ladders, " "Leela" is the ancient Hindu game of life. Play will reveal karmas, concerns, and patterns governing your life.

A mesmerizing, heartbreaking graphic novel of immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of twin sisters whose lives take radically and tragically different paths. “A haunting and often heartbreaking look at Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century [and] also a story about women, power, and bodies.” —Austin American-Statesman For six-year-old Esther and Fanya, the teeming streets of New York’s Lower East Side circa 1910 are both a fascinating playground and a place where life’s lessons are learned quickly and often cruelly. In drawings that capture both the tumult and the telling details of that street life, Unterzakhn (Yiddish for “Underthings”) tells the story of these sisters: as wide-eyed little girls absorbing the sights and sounds of a neighborhood of struggling immigrants; as teenagers taking their own tentative steps into the wider world (Esther working for a woman who runs both a burlesque theater and a whorehouse, Fanya for an obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions); and, finally, as adults battling for their own piece of the “golden land,” where the difference between just barely surviving and triumphantly succeeding involves, for each of them, painful decisions that will have unavoidably tragic repercussions.

I see LONDON, I see FRANCE, I see Sydney’s underpants. Nineteen-year-old Sydney has the perfect summer mapped out. She’s spending the next four and a half weeks traveling through Europe with her childhood best friend, Leela. Their plans include Eiffel-Tower selfies, eating cocco gelato, and making out with très hot strangers. Her plans do not include Leela’s cheating ex-boyfriend showing up on the flight to London, falling for the cheating ex-boyfriend’s très hot friend, monitoring her mother’s spiraling mental health via texts, or feeling like the rope in a friendship tug-of-war. In this hilarious and unforgettable adventure, New York Times bestselling author Sarah Mlynowski tells the story of a girl learning to navigate secret romances, thorny relationships, and the London Tube. As Sydney zigzags through Amsterdam, Switzerland, Italy, and France, she must learn when to hold on, when to keep moving, and when to jump into the Riviera . . . wearing only her polka-dot underpants.