The Simoquin Prophecies-Samit Basu

This is how a spoof should be .You stay nearly as faithful to the original storyline without bringing in the original characters and you don't make silly attempts at humor.It has got to be subtle.

The Simoquin Prophecies is not for the uninitiated.Samit Basu has basically used the Lord Of the Rings as a base of his book.It has several colorful characters and situations resembling Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men,a Hogwarts type magical school with magicians and spell binders .Also included is the ramayana,mahabharata,Egyptyian sphinxes and pharaoahs ,genies from the arabian desert and singing sirens who lure sailors to their deaths , fighting monks who closely resemble those in the Shaolin temple along with a dollop of Celtic representation in the form of a mysterious cicle of half broken stone megaliths(no prizes for guessing what I am referring to).And guess what,you can see movies and have real time aerial reconaissance

After a hero is found to defeat the dark lord who will supposedly wake up after lying defeated for two hundred years,he is sent on various quests to equip himself for the final showdown.Another young man,gifted with extraordinary powers of whch he had little knowledge till recently embarks on a journey to uncover his identity, and in the process dicover dangerous secrets.Forget the plot,just go along with the flow.

The Glass Palace-Amitav Ghosh

That Amitav Ghosh is a master wordsmith no one should be left in any doubt after this novel. An extensively researched historical fiction spread over three generations and from the annexation of Burma by thr British to the WWII. As the king of Burma is exiled to Ratnagiri in India an orphan Rajkumar sees a young girl named Dolly among the royal servants. The whole novel is based on the lifetime quest of Rajkumar for Dolly.Breathtaking in its cast of caracters and places, it stretches from the dark dense teak forests of Burma to the palaces of Calcutta to the mango gardens of Ratnagiri.The poignant story of the long march of thousands of refugees through the malaria infested trails of upper Assam ahead of the Japanese and also the Indian National Army -and its heavy casualties,wretchedness of the refugees- is conjured up so realistically that you can almos see tthe long dragging lines. In other words a wordpicture .

According to the autor this novel has been a labour of love for him.Sweat and toil ,blood and tears.A trivia-while reaearching for the Burma part of the story the author was fired upon.So the blood part is also literal !!

Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts

One of the best books I 've ever read.Reading this reinforces the power of the human will to overcome any problem life throws up.This is esentially a fable of loyalty,friendship, love and acceptance of an alien culture.

Roberts is an escaped felon covicted of armed robbery in Australia.He lands in Bombay and engages a guide named Prabhkar.They soon became friends and when he is robbed of everything,Prabhkar offers him space in the slum where he stays.Going about under an assumed name he falls in with a group of Europeans and Indians at the Leopold's bar-Didier the hard drinking flamboyant French,Karla an enigmatic Swiss-German with a past,Ulla a German prostitute and a few others.In the slum he set up a free clinic and also becomes friends with a powerful don.After incurring the hostility of a powerful prostitute mistress,he spend time in one of the toughest Indian jails,starved,beaten and tortured within a inch of his life.Fluent in Hindi and Marathi,rare for a gora,he worked in various illegal activities like gold smuggling,passport counterfeiting and money laundering.He acted in bit pieces in Bollywood and accompanied the don to the jihad in Afganistan,smuggling guns and supplies.It costs the life of his benefactor and half dead and severly decimated group returned to India through Pakistan where they were wanted by the ISI.Coming back to Bombay,he witnesses the dead don's faction regainnig power in the factional fight.On top of all that ,he falls in and out of life.

For an ordinary mortal,this is the stuff of several lifetimes.But Linbaba or Lin ,the name by which he goes by in the underworld packs it into eight short years.Roberts is an instinctive storyteller.He has you hooked from the first page to the last and you would never know when time flies while reading it.And the most significant insight into Roberts' character is that his two earlier six hundred page manuscripts of the book were destroyed by prison guards.
This book is the basis of a Hollywood movie with the central role played by Johnny Depp.