In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman. The man was in fact German, but in small-town India in those days, all white foreigners were largely thought of as British.

So begins the gracefully wrought (Kirkus Reviews) story of Myshkin and his mother, Gayatri, who rebels against tradition to follow her artist's instinct for freedom.

Freedom of a different kind is in the air across India. The fight against British rule is reaching a critical turn. The Nazis have come to power in Germany. At this point of crisis, two strangers arrive in Gayatri's town, opening up to her the vision of other possible lives.

What took Myshkin's mother from India and Dutch-held Bali in the 1930s, ripping a knife through his comfortingly familiar universe? Excavating the roots of the world in which he was abandoned, Myshkin comes to understand the connections between the anguish at home and a war-torn universe overtaken by patriotism.

Evocative and moving, this mesmerizing exploration of the darker consequences of freedom, love, and loyalty is an astonishing display of Roy's literary prowess (Publishers Weekly).

On the outskirts of a small town in Bengal, a family lives in solitude in their vast new house. Here, lives intertwine and unravel. A widower struggles with his love for an unmarried cousin. Bakul, a motherless daughter, runs wild with Mukunda, an orphan of unknown caste adopted by the family. Confined in a room at the top of the house, a matriarch goes slowly mad; her husband searches for its cause as he shapes and reshapes his garden. As Mukunda and Bakul grow, their intense closeness matures into something else, and Mukunda is banished to Calcutta. He prospers in the turbulent years after Partition, but his thoughts stay with his home, with Bakul, with all that he has lost--and he knows that he must return.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2011 MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HINDU LITERARY PRIZE FOR BEST FICTION 2011

With her debut novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, Anuradha Roy's exquisite storytelling instantly won readers' hearts around the world, and the novel was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and The Seattle Times. Now, Roy has returned with another masterpiece that is already earning international prize attention, an evocative and deeply moving tale of a young woman making a new life for herself amid the foothills of the Himalaya.

Desperate to leave a private tragedy behind, Maya abandons herself to the rhythms of the little village, where people coexist peacefully with nature. But all is not as it seems, and she soon learns that no refuge is remote enough to keep out the modern world. When power-hungry politicians threaten her beloved mountain community, Maya finds herself caught between the life she left behind and the new home she is determined to protect.

Elegiac, witty, and profound by turns, and with a tender love story at its core, The Folded Earth brims with the same genius and love of language that made An Atlas of Impossible Longing an international success and confirms Anuradha Roy as a major literary talent.

Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, a novel about violence, love, and religion in modern India

On a train bound for the seaside town of Jarmuli, known for its temples, three elderly women meet a young documentary filmmaker named Nomi, whose braided hair, tattoos, and foreign air set her apart. At a brief stop en route, the women witness a sudden assault on Nomi that leaves her stranded as the train pulls away.

Later in Jarmuli, among pilgrims, priests, and ashrams, the women disembark only to find that Nomi has managed to arrive on her own. What is someone like her, clearly not a worshipper, doing in this remote place? Over the next five days, the women live out their long-planned dream of a holiday together; their temple guide pursues a forbidden love; and Nomi is joined by a photographer to scout locations for a documentary. As their lives overlap and collide, Nomi's past comes into focus, and the serene surface of the town is punctured by violence and abuse as Jarmuli is revealed as a place with a long, dark history that transforms all who encounter it. A haunting, vibrant novel that was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and short-listed for the Hindu Literary Prize, Anuradha Roy's Sleeping on Jupiter is a brilliantly told story of contemporary India from an internationally acclaimed writer.

Rethinking Human-Animal Relationship engages with animal studies, a growing interdisciplinary field that reveals the deep human unreason and moral schizophrenia regarding their animal 'others'. This book focuses on the links of the unrelenting exploitation of animals throughout history to the domination of humans over other humans: women, lower classes, colonized people and other marginalized categories that are more or less animalized by oppressors. Facilitated by scientific insights into physical and emotional continuity between humans and non-humans as well as by the opening up of a theoretical space by postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism and other such critical modes of discourse, animal studies emphasizes the human failure to look beyond themselves due to cultural blinders. It emerges in the exploration of shifts in thought in this book that ultimately, this leads to a posthumanistic view, asserting that rather than championing the rights of certain select subjects from a safe ontological distance, one should, fundamentally question the very human schema of knowing them.

The first section of this volume indicates how the city has negotiated space from its formative years right up to the crucial juncture it seems to have reached recently as a result of the drastic shift towards mega-urbanity. The second section provides glimpse into the city in time, through the two global wars in the twentieth century, the Naxalite movement, the rule of the Left Front and beyond. The book seeks to understand the city not only in space and time, but also in imagination. While recognizing that the colonial rulers did play a vital role in the making of the city, the book is primarily about the active native participation in the process of Kolkata's urban transformation. It highlights the ordinary and the everyday, with special attention paid to the underclasses of the city. It uses a polyscopic perspective and presents the city as a fascinating heterotopia based on a coexistence of the haves and the have-nots, of the old and the new, of formality and informality.

The second volume of Kolkata in Space, Time and Imagination continues with the theme of the ordinary and the everyday, with special attention paid to the underclasses of the city, focusing on certain labouring sectors (including feminized ones) that have always been marginalized in the city's history and yet do assert their 'right to the city' even in this age of neoliberal economics that seems to be rapidly turning the city into a utopia for the middle-class.

This volume, moreover, deals with the efflorescence of creative imagination in the city's culturescape, focusing on certain literary and artistic genres. It also shows how, in a sense, the city itself is an imagined existence, albeit a pluralistic one, and how perceptions of the city's past and the conservation of its heritage are also largely determined by imagination. Just as the first volume highlights the politics of space and time, the present one makes a nuanced study of the politics of culture in the city.