Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.

Mary Poplin's chronicle of her volunteer work with the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta provides an inside glimpse into Mother Teresa's life of service to the poor. Transformed by the experience, Poplin discovered how all of us can find our own places of meaningful work and service.

From Victorian lndia to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night.

“What you’ve got to remember about us Bengalis,” a good friend once told Simon Parkes, “is that we’re only really interested in three things: educating our children, reading books, and food.” Bengalis have a passion for good food—its authenticity, its freshness, its part in social occasions, and the pleasure of serving it at the table. The Calcutta Kitchen captures the essence of those pleasures through the evocative narrative of the BBC Food Programme’s Simon Parkes, the recipes of renowned chef Udit Sarkhel, and the pictures of award-winning photographer Jason Lowe. Calcuttans know and adore fish, vegetables, and desserts in particular. They have a curiosity about food that never fades, and so they have embraced influences from around the world—most notably the English, Armenians, Jews, Tibetans, Chinese, Burmese, and Portuguese. Calcutta, and this book, has a taste of each of these cuisines. Until recently it was nigh-on impossible to taste Bengali cooking unless you were invited to a private home, yet this is some of the most sophisticated food in India. With its inexhaustible roll-call of fish and vegetables, its pungency derived from the widespread use of mustard (both seeds and oil) and its tempering with a blend of five spices known as panch phoron, it is an evolved yet accessible cuisine. The Calcutta Kitchen brings you recipes from one of the best-known Bengali chefs, Udit Sarkhel, and snapshots of the fish ponds, markets, artisan food producers, restaurants, clubs, cooks, gourmet, and street foods that play a part in the city’s rich culinary culture.