Name Place Animal Thing

‘There were no longer any signs of the house we stayed in, no doorway with its low entrance, no weeping willow or cryptomeria tree from which the caterpillars fell. The ramshackle cottage that housed my earliest friends and shaped my memories lay bare and forgotten. Only the flying termites remained, fluttering below the street lights outside the property.’ In this novella, Daribha Lyndem gently lifts the curtain on the coming of age of a young Khasi woman and the politically charged city of Shillong in which she lives. Like the beloved school game from which it takes its name, the book meanders through ages, lives and places. The interconnected stories build on each other to cover the breadth of a childhood, and move into the precarious awareness of adulthood. A shining debut, Name Place Animal Thing is an elegant examination of the porous boundaries between the adult world and that of a child’s.

An inspiring fable about hope, positivity, and living your best life, and a practical guide to answering the ultimate question: "So, what do you do?"

It is a true master puppeteer, the city; it has the puppets themselves fooled even as it works their strings to some unheard melody of its own. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Panjim, Mumbai - all cities that have transformed themselves in the past couple of decades, changing, in the process, the lives and aspirations of the people inhabiting them. Name, Place, Animal, Thing takes you into the bylanes of these cities to explore them through the eyes of its diverse characters. A tour guide at the historic Golconda Fort in Hyderabad finds himself at a crossroads when his son wants to assist a team of programmers in developing a self-guided tour app that will make his job redundant. A string puppet show at the annual Rann Utsav is an instant hit, but even as the katputli act unfolds onstage, behind the scenes, the puppeteers themselves are subject to the whims of the invisible strings of circumstance, and lives come apart against the hauntingly beautiful backdrop of the Rann of Kutch.Two families are on a joint vacation in Goa. But, like the rip tides that can lurk just beyond idyllic beaches, there are strong undercurrents of ego, competitiveness and discord below the surface of holiday camaraderie.An elderly widower sees an answer to his loneliness in the marital discord between his daughter and her husband. A new arrival at school gives two young girls growing up in sheltered middle-class households in Chennai a glimpse of a more dangerous world where people, and even families, are not always what they seem to be. A young introvert, just arrived in Bengaluru to take up a job with an IT firm, finds herself unwittingly drawn into the troubled dynamics of the family in whose home she stays as a paying guest. Populated with ordinary people, familiar locales and everyday situations, this collection of short stories shines a light on the changing face of modern India.

Suspected of attacking a boy from town and determined to protect her secrets and her twin sister, Jo flees into the woods, where she discovers the truth behind her mother's disappearance fifteen years ago.

Imagine walking to the same place every day, to meet your best friend. Imagine watching hundreds of people pass by every morning and every afternoon. Imagine waiting, and waiting, and waiting. For ten years. This is what Hachiko did. Hachiko was a real dog who lived in Tokyo, a dog who faithfully waited for his owner at the Shibuya train station long after his owner could not come to meet him. He became famous for his loyalty and was adored by scores of people who passed through the station every day. This is Hachiko’s story through the eyes of Kentaro, a young boy whose life is changed forever by his friendship with this very special dog. Simply told, and illustrated with Yan Nascimbene’s lush watercolors, the legend of Hachiko will touch your heart and inspire you as it has inspired thousands all over the world.

K.T.N. Kottoor was activist, lover, communist, friend, saint, sinner – but, above all, he was a writer... Born into a family of rural wealth and near-feudal influence in a village nestled in British Malabar, Koyiloth Thazhe Narayanan Kottoor knows little of want. But as a patriotic fervour grips the country in the last decades of the Raj, a veritable avalanche of new ideas and ideals shapes the young KTN. As he grows from a boy who takes to writing not only as art but also as a tool of social change, to an activist enamoured of varying philosophies and enmeshed in India’s freedom struggle, he grapples with hardship, love, lust and a search for meaning in a reality that forever disappoints. His is a tale both deeply personal and political – tracing a web of caste, sexuality and ideology, while also navigating the struggles of a man coming to terms with himself as a writer and as an individual. Award-winning author Thachom Poyil Rajeevan weaves a magical almost-biography of a fictional writer, one inhabited by goddesses and ghosts, a fortune-telling parrot, dead humans in the avatar of crows, and a blind woman who hears – and sees – better than anyone else. Masterfully translated from the original Malayalam, The Man Who Learnt to Fly but Could Not Land is a poignant exploration of the power of writing, the chaos of a country’s rebirth and the life of an idealist caught up in the maelstrom.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A “thrilling” (The New York Times), “dazzling” (The Wall Street Journal) tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong “One of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction.”—Oprah Daily ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, People, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Reader’s Digest, Publishers Weekly, BookPage ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Globe and Mail, The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses to encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved. Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”