A highly enjoyable, fast-paced tale of Bollywood corruption.
Bharucha, in this debut novel subtitled “A Saga of Sex, Greed and Betrayal,” delivers on all three counts with an ambitious tale centered on an Indian celebrity.
The novel opens with a coffee-drinking professor regaling his students with an anecdote about Ashok Kapoor, the most famous movie star in the world (“[O]ne billion people plus loving him. So many people cannot love your Stallone and Arnold!”). In it, the celebrity, called “the Hero” by his fans, inadvertently causes a commotion on Fifth Avenue in New York City, his Lamborghini holding up traffic as a cop tries to ticket him. Cabbies shout “AK!” in admiration, and locals stop to wonder whether a movie is being shot. This sets the tone for the next 400 pages, which are highly anecdotal, highly amusing, and rich with Indian artistic and political history. Readers continue to follow Kapoor, born Ramu More, and learn that his personal life is something less than heroic, as he carries on affairs and launders money. The story revolves largely around a television station, TV Metro, where AK goes to work after a series of box office flops. There, other people are brought into the mix, such as Shilpa More, AK’s high-caste mistress, whose father runs the network; and Darius Cooper, a powerful TV executive. The prose throughout the book is plain and clear, with Indian accents rendered into dialogue with intelligent subtlety. Indeed, the dialogue contains some of the best writing in the book, and it’s full of humor as it details the relationships between the characters; for example, when AK and his mistress are threatened with jail, the confident Shilpa says to him, “Why are we acting like we have been caught?” The book is, in a way, all about power dynamics, whether it’s talking about sex, the imperial oppression of India, or backroom bribes and shady dealings. There’s much to take away from this story, as it addresses how greed’s destructive nature can affect anyone.
A highly enjoyable, fast-paced tale of Bollywood corruption.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4921-6505-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Long, slow stretches mar a novel that portrays life in the English countryside during the early days of World War II.
Injured fighter pilot Mark Brabham recuperates at his uncle’s home in rural England in this World War II historical novel.
While the men (and some women) fought, those left behind (the old, the young and the female) did what they could to keep the home front secure, including guarding the coast and rooting out spies and enemy insurgents. Brabham, a Royal Air Force fighter pilot who learned to fly at his grandfather’s knee, eagerly enlisted in the RAF when he came of age but was shot down two months after joining his squadron. After his badly burned body had time to heal, the rest of his recuperation was spent at his pastor uncle’s home at Lavering-on-Sea. In short order, he was put to work helping out as much as a severely burned soldier could. In between trips back to the hospital, he spent his days leading the Scouts, helping to patrol the coastlines, and spending time with Elizabeth, a working-class evacuee who was working at a local farm and leading the Girl Scout troop. There are periods of excitement here, so the author clearly knows how to build tension, but it often takes too long for something to actually happen. Summers clearly cares about his subject; he offers a rare glimpse into life on the home front—from patrolling the beach to gas and meat rations to the town’s easy acceptance of London evacuees. He also has a strong protagonist in brave, personable Mark.
Long, slow stretches mar a novel that portrays life in the English countryside during the early days of World War II.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452072326
Page Count: 396
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A bracing homage to Homer and the Greeks.
A rollicking new chapter in an ambitious, multivolume extrapolation on Greek myth.
For those who slept through Classics 101: The Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, an epic conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans during which the Greeks besieged Troy in an effort to save Helen, a beautiful woman who had been captured and held by the Trojan Paris. In the third installment of this particular story, the hero Petraeus attempts to complete his unlikely transformation from slave to king in a seven-book series existing in the same universe as Homer’s classic. Johnson’s novel takes place in between the kidnapping of Helen and the beginning of the war; in it, the Greek king Agamemnon asks the up-and-coming hero Petraeus to pursue Paris and Helen and retrieve the Greek beauty. However, if the novel owes much of its substance to the Iliad, it takes its form from Homer’s other great epic, the Odyssey. Like this second pillar of ancient Greek literature, this novel tells the story of an epic sea voyage that sends its hero careening around the Mediterranean on his winding way to track down the lost pair. During his entertaining, circuitous journey, Petraeus solves a murder, cavorts with Amazons, receives gifts from the Egyptian pharaoh Ramasses, and survives a brush with death at the hands of the evil Ba’al. Most of Johnson’s fresh tale is of his own making, but it takes enough cues from standard Greek lore that mythology buffs will have fun tracking down his more oblique references. Furthermore, though his story is epic in scope, Johnson’s attention to detail imbues his novel a pleasant sense of balance. His brief but thorough meditations on the art of shipbuilding or the intricacies of ancient commerce are as fulfilling as his rip-roaring stories of naval battles, bounty hunters and skin-of-the-teeth escapes.
A bracing homage to Homer and the Greeks.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1456771225
Page Count: 239
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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