Three years ago, the brutal killing of a young TV producer called Neeraj Grover sent shockwaves through Mumbai. An alluring aspiring actress, Maria Susairaj, and her dashing naval officer boyfriend, Emile Jerome, were accused of killing him and hacking his body into pieces, before setting it on fire. The cast of characters was young, attractive, and upwardly mobile, the press hungry for a headline. As details of the case unravelled, the questions flew around—what had gone wrong? What made these young professionals turn to violent crime? Was it the savage pressure of the city, or was the motive even darker? This book will shock and inspire a much needed change in perception of celebrity culture and Bollywood. It’s about so much more than a contested killing case and will be a talking point for years to come.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY “Inspiring . . . extraordinary . . . [Katherine Boo] shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care.”—People “A tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece.”—Judges, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today • New York • The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • Newsday In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi’s “most-everything girl,” might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds—and into the hearts of families impossible to forget. WINNER OF: The PEN Nonfiction Award • The Los Angeles Times Book Prize • The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award • The New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • The Boston Globe • The Economist • Financial Times • Foreign Policy • The Seattle Times • The Nation • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Denver Post • Minneapolis Star Tribune • The Week • Kansas City Star • Slate • Publishers Weekly

Bombay, 1896. A serial killer is on the loose. In Room 000, detectives struggle to snare the culprit, but this murderer is always one step ahead of them. When death is a contagion that spreads from house to house and from street to street, where does one look for clues? As the investigators in Room 000, armed with microscopes and cultures, track the killer, they invent a new science. But the Raj imprisons Bombay in antiquated disciplines that turn the plague into an epic tragedy. Room 000 takes a Holmesian look at the Bombay Plague. In these pages, you'll meet the Argyll Street Irregulars, share the anxieties of the Reluctant Ephemerist, thrill to the discoveries of the Solitary Scientist, and shudder over the repulsive story of the Red Leech. Here too, is Tatya Lakshman, the first Indian detective of the Bombay Police in hot pursuit of the Parsi Plague Current. In their signature style, Kalpish Ratna meld science and adventure into intrigue and mystery. The forgotten truths of the Bombay Plague, seen from this very human perspective, will compel us to look at today's emerging epidemics in an entirely new light.

As a private detective in Calcutta she had impressed maverick security expert Shayak Gupta with her sleuthing skills, leading to a new job with his firm Titanium. Now in Mumbai, Reema is given the case of the year - the murder of Ashutosh Dhingre, former assistant to fading Bollywood superstar Kimaaya Kapoor. The location of the crime is Kimaaya's private island. The suspects - her house guests, and Kimaaya herself! Reema learns of Kimaaya's prior relationship with Shayak, and can't help but think it is a conflict of interest. Equally puzzling is Shayak's repeated absence. And what of the continuing attraction simmering between her and her secretive boss? Despite the state-of-the-art facilities at Titanium, Reema is soon back to her own devices - which sometimes involves cooking up something for a spot of culinary meditation - to get to the bottom of a crime that points to a deep and sinister plot. As the body count increases, can Reema crack the case before more blood is spilled?

How do you tame a wild virus in a city of 12 million people? This petrifying thought was at the top of many minds when the first two cases of coronavirus were detected in Mumbai on March 11, 2020. Covid-19, which had brought big nations with robust health systems down to their knees, soon found its way to Mumbai’s densest localities, including Dharavi. The coronavirus pandemic was Mumbai’s fourth encounter with a health emergency of an overwhelming scale. In 1896, the city had fought the bubonic plague. In 1918, the deadly Spanish Flu swept the city. Ninety-one years later, Mumbai was once again in the grip of a virus- Influenza H1N1. Then came the coronavirus, the biggest pandemic of the 21st century yet. Suresh Kakani’s Mumbai Fights Back offers a blow by blow account of the challenges and triumphs of India’s richest civic body in fighting an invisible enemy for two years. From erecting mammoth field hospitals on open grounds to guaranteeing beds for every patient, the book rivetingly chronicles the united efforts by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai to curb the transmission and save lives.

An enthralling virtuoso debut that eloquently captures the loves and losses of a dying man 'All the elements of great storytelling are here, the mystic transports of Ben Okri with the intimate charm of Arundhati Roy ... enchanting' Sunday Tribune 'Beautifully captures with great tenderness and depth the eternal war between duty and desire. This is a love letter to Bombay and its people' Sunday Express Vishnu, the odd-job man in a Bombay apartment block, lies dying on the staircase landing. Around him the lives of the apartment dwellers unfold - the warring housewives on the first floor, the lovesick teenagers on the second, and the widower, alone and quietly grieving at the top of the building. In a fevered state Vishnu looks back on his love affair with the seductive Padmini and comedy becomes tragedy as his life draws to a close.

From NPR editor Krishnadev Calamur comes an engrossing murder mystery set in the heart of the new India. Mumbai, India: a city of beauty and squalor, old and new, wealth and poverty, honest work and deep corruption… and inevitable target of scandal and condemnation if Inspector Vijay Gaikwad doesn’t solve the murder of American businesswoman Liz Barton, and quickly. Just as invested is newspaper reporter Jay Ganesh, looking for the one big story to repair his once-prestigious reputation. Both men soon discover, however, that the case is as difficult to navigate as Mumbai’s infamous traffic. From her cheating husband to the billionaire industrialist with whom she was “close”; from her jealous colleague to the environmentalist protesting her company, Barton was not short on potential enemies… and nor are they short on lies. But the pressure is on for Gaikwad, the family man trying to do right on an often unscrupulous force, to place the blame on someone, anyone, and Jay is determined to be the first with the scoop—no matter how deadly.

Nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel! In 19th century Bombay, Captain Jim Agnihotri channels his idol, Sherlock Holmes, in Nev March’s Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award-winning debut. In 1892, Bombay is the center of British India. Nearby, Captain Jim Agnihotri lies in Poona military hospital recovering from a skirmish on the wild northern frontier, with little to do but re-read the tales of his idol, Sherlock Holmes, and browse the daily papers. The case that catches Captain Jim's attention is being called the crime of the century: Two women fell from the busy university’s clock tower in broad daylight. Moved by Adi, the widower of one of the victims — his certainty that his wife and sister did not commit suicide — Captain Jim approaches the Parsee family and is hired to investigate what happened that terrible afternoon. But in a land of divided loyalties, asking questions is dangerous. Captain Jim's investigation disturbs the shadows that seem to follow the Framji family and triggers an ominous chain of events. And when lively Lady Diana Framji joins the hunt for her sisters’ attackers, Captain Jim’s heart isn’t safe, either. Based on a true story, and set against the vibrant backdrop of colonial India, Nev March's Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award-winning lyrical debut, Murder in Old Bombay, brings this tumultuous historical age to life.

Death and Life of Nature in Asian Cities explores the encounter between two processes that are unfolding in diverse patterns across Asia—the rapid urbanization of Asia across big cities, smaller towns, and the newest urban concentrations; and the contentious debates and novel schemes by which nature is figured and emplaced in cities and their conurbations. Contemporary Asian cities displace nature by causing its death and withering, but also embrace it through acts of renewal and the pursuit of sustainability. Contributors in this volume gather case studies from across Asia to address projects of urban greening and reimagining nature in urban life. The book illustrates how the intersection of urban growth and urban nature is a place rich with fresh ideas about urban planning, governance, and social life. This book illuminates a continuing process of discovery and regeneration through which urban natures may well be moving from taken-for-granted infrastructures to more consciously experienced sites of interplay between non-human life and materials, and daily human life experiences. Debates and efforts to recover nature in the city provoke moral and ethical evaluations of the human ecology of city life, and direct ecologies of urbanism into new avenues like aesthetics, care, perception, and stewardship. “This fascinating collection of essays brings together a series of cutting-edge insights into Asian cities caught in the maelstrom of global environmental change. A particular strength of this book is its commitment to forms of interdisciplinary dialogue and conceptual engagement that unsettle existing geographies of knowledge.” —Matthew Gandy, University of Cambridge; author of Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space “This impressive collection on urban ecologies moves beyond the anthropocentric city to expand our understanding of cities as multispecies spaces of active collaboration, decay, and regeneration, offering new possibilities for the flourishing of urban life—both human and non-human—and the design of more just and sustainable cities for all.” —Christina Schwenkel, University of California, Riverside; author of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider’s view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse, opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood, and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks. As each individual story unfolds, Mehta also recounts his own efforts to make a home in Bombay after more than twenty years abroad. Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.