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In the Kitchen

Gran Cocina Latina, The Food of Latin America

Maricel E. Presilla

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Antarctica

Endurance, Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Alfred Lansing

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Arctic Dreams

Barry Lopez

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Every Day in Tuscany, Seasons of an Italian Life

Frances Mayes

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Great Indian Writers

READING AND TRAVEL GUIDE

The Artist of Disappearance

The Artist of Disappearance

by Anita Desai

  • LITERATURE
  • 2011
  • HARD COVER
  • 176 PAGES

In just three sharply drawn, interconnected stories Desai evokes a whole world, showing the contrast between old and new, urban and rural in contemporary India. (IDA635, $23.00)

Last Man in Tower

Last Man in Tower

by Aravind Adiga

  • LITERATURE
  • 2011
  • HARD COVER
  • 381 PAGES

A new novel by the 2008 Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger. Adiga's riveting story of money and power, luxury and deprivation, set in the booming city of Mumbai, revolves around the residents of an old-fashioned apartment tower -- and the developer who wants to buy them out. (IDA643, $26.95)

India, A Traveler's Literary Companion

India, A Traveler's Literary Companion

by Chandrahas Choudhury

  • ANTHOLOGY
  • 2010
  • PAPER
  • 256 PAGES

Each of these 14 stories evokes place and landscape, providing an excellent introduction both to contemporary writers and to India's diverse cultures and history. (IDA598, $14.95)

Swimming Lessons

Swimming Lessons

by Rohinton Mistry

  • LITERATURE
  • 1997
  • PAPER
  • 256 PAGES

In these witty, poignant stories, Mistry charts the intersecting lives of Firozsha Baag, an apartment building in Bombay, yielding a delightful collective portrait of a middle-class Indian community poised between old ways and new. (IDA626, $15.00)

The Romantics

The Romantics

by Pankaj Mishra

  • LITERATURE
  • 2001
  • PAPER
  • 272 PAGES

The story of a Brahmin youth who travels to the holy city of Benares and falls in with a motley crew of westerners enamored of India. (IDA143, $16.00)

The Moor's Last Sigh

The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  • LITERATURE
  • 1997
  • PAPER
  • 435 PAGES

A sweeping family epic that tackles many of the most complex aspects about Indian culture. In his characteristically rich prose, Rushdie tells the history of India, set among the spice traders of Cochin. (IDA89, $16.00)

The Guide

The Guide

by R. K. Narayan

  • LITERATURE
  • 2006
  • PAPER
  • 240 PAGES

A comic look at the life of a rogue, set in Malgudi, a fictional town in southern India like many of Narayan's novels. Originally published in 1958. (IDA310, $15.00)

The Glass Palace

The Glass Palace

by Amitav Ghosh

  • LITERATURE
  • 2002
  • PAPER
  • 474 PAGES

In this panoramic novel full of tales and anecdote, Ghosh follows the lives and fortunes of Rajkumar and his family over three eventful generations in Burma, India and Malaysia. (IDA173, $15.00)

 

The Beautiful and the Damned, A Portrait of the New India


by Siddhartha Deb

  • CULTURAL PORTRAIT
  • 2011
  • HARD COVER
  • 272 PAGES

Six years after leaving his home in northeastern India for a fellowship at Columbia, Deb returned home to work as an undercover reporter for The Guardian. The novelist's first nonfiction book mixes personal narrative with incisive portraits of a wide range of contemporary Indian personalities. (IDA639, $26.00)

A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance


by Rohinton Mistry

  • LITERATURE
  • 1997
  • PAPER
  • 624 PAGES
  • FAVORITE

Set in Indira Gandhi's "Emergency Raj" of 1975 in an unnamed Indian "city by the sea," which bears a striking resemblance to Bombay, this tender novel follows the intermingled fortunes of a Parsi widow, her boarder and two tailors. (IDA92, $17.00)

A Suitable Boy

A Suitable Boy


by Vikram Seth

  • LITERATURE
  • 2005
  • PAPER
  • 1488 PAGES

A modern classic set in Calcutta, Delhi and other northern India cities after Independence, bursting with history, character, and politics. In this outstanding epic novel, Seth displays his cultural sensitivity, historical insight, and poetic creativity. (IDA27, $21.99)

Baumgartner's Bombay

Baumgartner's Bombay


by Anita Desai

  • LITERATURE
  • 2000
  • PAPER
  • 240 PAGES

The tale of Hugo Baumgartner, a Jewish businessman who flees to India to escape persecution. (IDA245, $13.95)

Family Matters

Family Matters


by Rohinton Mistry

  • LITERATURE
  • 2003
  • PAPER
  • 444 PAGES

An aging professor comes to live with his daughter, her husband and their two children in a cramped Bombay apartment in Mistry's moving, and often comic, tale. (IDA214, $16.95)

Fasting, Feasting


by Anita Desai

  • LITERATURE
  • 2000
  • PAPER
  • 228 PAGES

A well-constructed and deeply disturbing story of a sister and brother in a middle-class Indian family. Dull Uma is constrained to live at home and totally controlled by her parents, whereas bright Arun is helped to achieve academically and goes abroad to America. An eye-opening view into cultural differences and the Indian experience at home and abroad. (IDA172, $13.95)

Gods, Demons and Others

Gods, Demons and Others


by R. K. Narayan | R.K. Laxman

  • LITERATURE
  • 1993
  • PAPER
  • 241 PAGES

Hindu stories freely adapted by Narayan, one of India's foremost writers. They include tales both highly readable and revealing of Indian Hindu traditions, some drawn from the Ramayana and the Mahabarata. (IDA101, $25.00)

Heat and Dust

Heat and Dust


by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  • LITERATURE
  • 1999
  • PAPER
  • 192 PAGES
  • COMING IN OCTOBER

This short novel, centered around an Anglo-Indian romance, tackles with precision issues of class, colonialism and propriety in 1920s India. (IDA239, $15.95)

In a Free State

In a Free State


by V.S. Naipaul

  • LITERATURE
  • 2002
  • PAPER
  • 256 PAGES

The Booker Prize Winning collection. (IDA557, $15.00)

Malgudi Days

Malgudi Days


by R. K. Narayan

  • LITERATURE
  • 2006
  • PAPER
  • 272 PAGES
  • FAVORITE

Wonderful tales from one of India's foremost writers about a fictional South Indian town, populated by quirky characters whose unique approaches to tradition and modernity are the stuff of great short stories. (IDA59, $15.00)

Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children


by Salman Rushdie

  • LITERATURE
  • 2006
  • PAPER
  • 533 PAGES
  • FAVORITE

Crowned Best of the Booker in 2008, Rushdie's greatest novel is a madcap, comic take on the birth of modern India in all its splendid and unexpected manifestations. (IDA12, $16.00)

Mr Sampath -- The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma

Mr Sampath -- The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma


by R. K. Narayan

  • LITERATURE
  • 2006
  • HARD COVER
  • 616 PAGES

An Everyman's Library edition of three novels written after India's independence -- including the comic tale, Narayan's funniest, of the printer of Malgudi, whose glamorous new job as screenwriter goes to his head. (IDA336, $25.00)

River of Smoke

River of Smoke


by Amitav Ghosh

  • LITERATURE
  • 2012
  • PAPER
  • 528 PAGES

A clipper ship carrying opium from India to Canton, a nursery ship on the trail of rare Chinese plants, and the good ship Ibis, full of indentured servants, converge in Canton's Fanqui-Town, or Foreign Enclave in this second book in Ghosh's epic trilogy. (IDA638, $16.00)

Sea of Poppies

Sea of Poppies


by Amitav Ghosh

  • LITERATURE
  • 2009
  • PAPER
  • 528 PAGES

Amativ Ghosh conjures the tumult of the 19th-century Opium Wars and colonial India in this expansive tale, featuring a motley cast of British, Chinese and Indian characters. (IDA529, $16.00)

Shalimar the Clown

Shalimar the Clown


by Salman Rushdie

  • LITERATURE
  • 2006
  • PAPER
  • 398 PAGES

Rushdie's sprawling novel overflows with allusions, ideas, characters and commentary. As told through the life of Shalimar, it concerns the fate of Kashmir, Hindu and Muslim animosity, adultery and contemporary Los Angeles. (IDA270, $16.00)

Shame

Shame


by Salman Rushdie

  • LITERATURE
  • 2000
  • PAPER
  • 320 PAGES

This is Rushdie's fictionalized account of the first 40 years of Pakistan and the reign of the Bhutto clan. Though the author takes his usual liberties with magic, coincidence, and parallel lives, the book is a historical novel at its core. (PKN12, $15.00)

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher


by R. K. Narayan

  • LITERATURE
  • 2006
  • HARD COVER
  • 648 PAGES

Four early novels in an omnibus Everyman's edition. Narayan introduces his beloved Malgudi in Swami and Friends -- in which Swaminathan's excitement about his country's initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardor for cricket and all other things British. (IDA337, $27.00)

The Enchantress of Florence

The Enchantress of Florence


by Salman Rushdie

  • LITERATURE
  • 2009
  • PAPER
  • 368 PAGES

Rushdie conjures life in Renaissance Florence and the Mughal Empire with humor and vivid detail in this bawdy, improbable tale. (ITL948, $15.00)

The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things


by Arundhati Roy

  • LITERATURE
  • 2008
  • PAPER
  • 336 PAGES

This luminous, Booker-prize winning novel is part mystery, part family saga -- a tale of lost innocence set in Kerala during the tumult of the 1960s. (IDA31, $16.00)

The Inheritance of Loss

The Inheritance of Loss


by Kiran Desai

  • LITERATURE
  • 2006
  • PAPER
  • 336 PAGES

Alternating between a once grand household in northern India and the life of the cook's son in New York, this novel by the marvelous and wise Desai skewers the aspirations and reality of both worlds. (IDA303, $14.95)

The Shadow Lines

The Shadow Lines


by Amitav Ghosh

  • LITERATURE
  • 2005
  • PAPER
  • 256 PAGES

Set in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh's novel follows two families, one English, one Bengali, as their paths intertwine in tragic and comic ways. (IDA513, $14.00)

The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature

The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature


by Amit Chaudhuri

  • LITERATURE
  • 2003
  • PAPER
  • 672 PAGES

An introduction to Indian fiction and poetry since 1850, including works both in translation and written originally in English. The authors span a century and a half of Indian letters, from Tagore and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Rushdie and Anita Desai. (IDA218, $21.00)

The White Tiger, A Novel

The White Tiger, A Novel


by Aravind Adiga

  • LITERATURE
  • 2008
  • PAPER
  • 288 PAGES

Mordant, funny, angry, horrifying, this Booker Prize-winning tale of a village pauper turned success (and murderer) skewers the ambition, inequity and corruption of 21st-century India. (IDA542, $16.00)

Train to Pakistan, A Novel

Train to Pakistan, A Novel


by Khushwant Singh

  • LITERATURE
  • 1990
  • PAPER
  • 226 PAGES

This novel, set during the violence following the 1947 creation of Pakistan by the British, follows the inhabitants of a fictional Punjab village. (IDA264, $14.95)

Twilight in Delhi

Twilight in Delhi


by Ahmed Ali

  • LITERATURE
  • 1994
  • PAPER
  • 200 PAGES

Set at the turn-of-the-century, this much-loved novel, written in English, captures life in Delhi through the tale of the Muslim merchant Mir Nihal and his family. It's an enlightening portrait of Mughal Delhi, its culture and traditions, family ceremonies and traditions, kite battles and pigeon flying. (IDA62, $15.95)

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Longitude provides recommended reading for travelers in partnership with the leading tour operators and travel programs for hundreds of destinations worldwide. We've got the classic, new and hard-to-find books and maps to help you get the most out of your adventures.