About the Book THE SECOND PART TO THE RUNAWAY BOY, WINNER OF THE KALINGA LITERATURE The second part of this extraordinary trilogy takes us into the late 1960s and early 1970s when the rumblings of liberation grew louder in East Pakistan and refugees came pouring into India, seeking asylum in the camps of West Bengal. The Naxalite movement too was gathering momentum; the Communist Party split into CPI (M) and CPI (ML), and a bitter power tussle ensued between them and the ruling Congress Party led by Indira Gandhi. Amidst this bloody battle, we find a twenty-something Jibon in Calcutta, driven to rage by hunger, inequity and a naïve, contagious nationalistic fervour. This burning torch of a novel is a compelling portrait of a youth negotiating the streets of Calcutta, looking to seize a life that is constantly denied to him.

“If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.” This quote by Robert Goolrick caught my attention while I was in déjà vu of unrequited love! Love is a beautiful emotion; it can even spark that hope of life in once a supposedly dead man. Unrequited love, on the other hand, can make one do what may seem impossible to him. The theme for February 2023 – Remembering Unrequited Love was slightly a painful one but it was worth it. As India Celebrated Mahashivratri on 18th February 2023, being a Lord Shiva Devotee, I have followed him wholeheartedly and will keep following him as his presence in me gives me a special energy of its own kind. Mentioning Lord Shiva, we are always in search of answers to our questions related to the history, and the existence of Gods. Fret not! You will get the answers to most of your questions by reading this book. This month, we are super excited to feature the author of Mahagatha – 100 Tales from the Puranas, Making Puranas a Bestseller, Satyarth Nayak on the cover of Storizen Magazine. Check out the exclusive feature on page 6. Reading can be a mundane task and not liked by many of us nowadays. Do you know it has the power to change your personality? Check out the article inside to know how. As we are dedicated to our love for literature, we can’t stop loving the latest books and reviewing them for our readers. We are glad to introduce a new Book Reviewer - Kiran Adharapuram who would be reviewing selected titles along with our best and favorite book reviewer – Swapna Peri. This issue comprises reviews of 16 books that will make you read even more. Check them out now. Keep showering your love and we will bring in more valuable content to enlighten you. Happy Reading!

“This tightly written tale rollicks along at a great pace.”—FINANCIAL TIMES When adventurer Jason Lewis regained consciousness beside a busy Colorado highway, lower limbs shattered by a hit-and-run driver, he knew he was lucky to be alive. But would he ever walk again, let alone finish crossing North America by inline skates? So begins part two of The Expedition, a stirring saga of hope, determination, and the kindness of strangers as Jason, taken in by the people of Pueblo, spent nine months in rehabilitation, legs pieced together with metal rods, before returning to the spot he was run over and continuing on. Inspired by the journey, others sought to join, including a middle-aged mother-cum-schoolteacher yearning to see the world. For the expedition wasn’t just a line on a map. The real expedition was the seed buried deep in the heart of anyone who has ever dreamed of knowing what lies beyond their valley, and of embarking upon a grand adventure to find out… * * ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year and winner of the National Indie Excellence Award * * “Magnificent!”—THE DAILY MAIL “An adventure of two lifetimes.”—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “The Expedition speaks powerfully of a reality most people need to hear. It takes noble thinking on behalf of the planet, a love for life, and a soul full of dreams to accomplish a truly great journey.”—LES STROUD, Survivorman “A catalogue of hair-raising adventures.”—PRESS ASSOCIATION “The perfect blend of action, tragedy, humor and suspense. In the first chapter alone. A must read.”—ADVENTURE CYCLIST “We need the Lewises of this life. It is good to know that such people exist, have always existed, doubtless always will exist. It does our hearts good to hear about them.”—THE LONDON TIMES “An unputdownable page turner. It’s a 21st Century Odyssey full of grit and terrifying escapes told with wonderful humor at a breakneck pace.”—SIR CHRIS BONINGTON, mountaineer

About the Book FROM THE WINNER OF THE HINDU PRIZE 2018 AND THE SHAKTI BHATT PRIZE 2022 This powerful trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels begins in East Pakistan. It tells the story of little Jibon, who arrives at a refugee camp in West Bengal in the arms of his Dalit parents escaping from the Muslim-majority nation. He grows up perpetually hungry for hot rice in the camp where the treatment meted out to dispossessed families like his is deplorable. When he is barely thirteen, Jibon runs away to Calcutta because he has heard that money flies in the air in the big city. His wildly innocent imagination leads him to believe that he can go out into the world, find work and bring back food for his starving siblings and clothes for his mother whose only sari is in tatters. And once he leaves home, through the travels of this starving, bewildered but gritty boy, we witness a newly independent India as it grapples with communalism and grave disparities of all kinds.

About the Book SHORTLISTED FOR THE JCB PRIZE, THE DSC PRIZE, THE CROSSWORD BOOK AWARD IN 2019 AND THE MATHRUBHUMI BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE IN 2020 It’s the early seventies. The Naxalbari Movement is gathering strength in Bengal. Young men and women have left their homes, picked up arms to free land from the clutches of feudal landlords and the state, and return them to oppressed landless farmers. They are being arrested en masse and thrown into high-security jails. In one such jail, five Naxals are meticulously planning a jailbreak. They must free themselves if the revolution is to continue. But petty thief Bhagoban, much too happy to serve frequent terms for free food and shelter, has been planted by Jailor Bireshwar Mukherjee among them as a mole. Only, Bhagoban seems to be warming up to them. There’s Gunpowder in the Air is a searing investigation into what deprivation and isolation can do to human idealism. And Manoranjan Byapari is perhaps the most refreshing voice to emerge from Bengal in recent times.

Winner of The Hindu Prize 2018 (Non-fiction) Shortlisted for the 3rd JIO MAMI Word to Screen Award 2018 If you insist that you do not know me, let me explain myself … you will feel, why, yes, I do know this person. I’ve seen this man. With these words, Manoranjan Byapari points to the inescapable roles all of us play in an unequal society. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit is the translation of his remarkable memoir Itibritte Chandal Jivan. It talks about his traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, facing persistent want—an experience that would dominate his life. The book charts his futile flight from home to escape hunger, in search of work as a teenager around the country, only to face further exploitation. In Kolkata in the 1970s, as a young man, he got caught up in the Naxalite movement and took part in gang warfare. His world changed dramatically when he was taught the alphabet in prison at the age of 24—it drew him into a new, enticing world of books. After prison, he worked as a rickshaw-wallah and one day the writer Mahasweta Devi happened to be his passenger. It was she who led him to his first publication. Today, as Sipra Mukherjee points out, ‘issues of poverty, hunger and violence have exploded the cautiously sewn boundaries of the more affluent world’, rendering archaic the comfortable distances between them. Despite ‘Chandal’ explicitly referring to a Dalit caste, this narrative weaves in and out of the margins.

Discover the “extraordinary” (The Washington Post) debut novel that “announces the arrival of a literary supernova” (The New York Times Book Review),“a drama of childhood that is as wild as it is intimate” (Chigozie Obioma). WINNER OF THE EDGAR® AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • The Washington Post • NPR • The Guardian • Library Journal In a sprawling Indian city, a boy ventures into its most dangerous corners to find his missing classmate. . . . Through market lanes crammed with too many people, dogs, and rickshaws, past stalls that smell of cardamom and sizzling oil, below a smoggy sky that doesn’t let through a single blade of sunlight, and all the way at the end of the Purple metro line lies a jumble of tin-roofed homes where nine-year-old Jai lives with his family. From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in one, to him they seem a thousand miles away. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line plunges readers deep into this neighborhood to trace the unfolding of a tragedy through the eyes of a child as he has his first perilous collisions with an unjust and complicated wider world. Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows, and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari (though she gets the best grades) and Faiz (though Faiz has an actual job). When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit. But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighborhood. Jai, Pari, and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force, and rumors of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again. Drawing on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is extraordinarily moving, flawlessly imagined, and a triumph of suspense. It captures the fierce warmth, resilience, and bravery that can emerge in times of trouble and carries the reader headlong into a community that, once encountered, is impossible to forget.