Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> Cultural Heritage

Back in the 1940s, when Mumbai was still Bombay, the twin urban villages of Kevni-Amboli were home to a lively Catholic community—predominantly East Indian, but also Anglo-Indian, Goan and Mangalorean. In this hugely entertaining novel set in that vanished world, Ivan Arthur spins a delightful web of joint families, priests, sodality groups, gossips, friendly drunks, vagrants, simpletons, lovers and maiden aunts.

Among the many lovable and eccentric characters are Hanging Gardens, a simple gravedigger who, by a quirk of fate, nurtures a millionaire mechanic; Blaise Misquitta,...

Slavonic Dances is a sequence of three linked novellas which explore the comic and tragic implications of encounters by Scottish characters with matters of eastern and east-central Europe. 'Mrs Makarowski', the first story, tells of a good-natured working-class Fife woman who marries a Polish soldier stationed in her area during the war, and her bemusement - amounting at times to anxiety - as she learns of the dark realities of his background. 'The Kilt' takes its cue from the discovery of two strange photographs; the central character is Angus Cooper, a young...

Nivi Delisle, a psychoanalyst and magazine editor, nearly drowns while swimming off the Ile de Re; the astrophysicist Theo Passemant fishes her...

‘The Americas were generous enough to preserve the literatures and ruins of the Incas, the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Native Americans in a number of museums. But the self-proclaimed liberal and tolerant Indian culture had spared not even that much space for the Asurs. They existed only as vestiges of myths.’

After a long period of unemployment, Master Sahib is appointed to a school for tribal girls in rural Jharkhand—on a remote plateau, near open bauxite mines. He has heard of the Asur tribe who live there—that they are primitive, crude...

Artist Sophie Smith "listens" to fossils to seek inspiration, but her latest subjects, a pair of ape-like human ancestors, millions of years old, could give her something else as well. Never has she needed a clear perspective on human descent so much, for now she is unexpectedly pregnant.

As Sophie struggles to make art and make a decision, her speculations frame and introduce the real stories of seventy-five years in a proto-human community, the "foot-ape" Tribe of the River Confluence. There is the community founder who must make a terrible choice to reclaim her power and dignity....