Gr. 11-12 GPX Trip Book Club: Home

Myshkin begins to understand his rebellious mother after following her journey through India and Bali during WWII.

Batuk, a teenager sold into prostitution in Mumbai, survives with the help of her blue notebook, a journal in which she writes precious memories of her earlier life, and makes up beautiful, fantastic stories.

Set in Bombay amid the turbulence of India's surge towards independence, Brahma's Dream tells the story of thirteen-year-old Mohini, an unforgettable character whose medical problems set her apart from the world around her, and give her a wisdom and special place in it. Mohini suffers from a rare form of anemia that gradually diminishes her physically but increases her understanding of life in a way incomprehensible to those who move more easily through it.

A cobra flies in through an open window. Wives form a pact against their bigamous, abusive husband. A mother and son battle over eagles' eggs. A homeless guest with a secret. An elephant protests on a highway. A woman marries a pumpkin. Diverse people - one country! This is the teeming, hectic world of India. It is also the vivid, startling world that Jasmine D's Costa gives us in Curry is Thicker than Water.

Uma, the older daughter of an Indian family, lives in relative poverty with her parents, while her younger brother Arun lives in America; both tending to their demanding parents.

Noor has lived all of her fourteen years in the fifteen lanes of Mumbai's red light district. Born into a brothel, she is destined for the same fate as her mother: a desperate life trapped in the city's sex trade. She must act soon to have any chance of escaping this grim future. Across the sprawling city, fifteen-year-old Grace enjoys a life of privilege. Her father, the CEO of one of India's largest international banks, has brought his family to Mumbai where they live in unparalleled luxury. But Grace's seemingly perfect life is shattered when she becomes a victim of a cruel online attack. When their paths intersect, Noor and Grace will be changed forever. Can two girls living in vastly different worlds find a common path?

With a magnificent narrative sweep and compassionate realism, Rohinton Mistry's internationally acclaimed bestseller captures all the sweetness and sorrow of India, its cruelty and corruption, its strength and dignity. The time is 1975, the place an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a state of emergency. And in its wake, four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the violence of their native village--are thrust together by events, forced to share a cramped apartment and an uncertain future. Through days of darkness and despair, but also hope and laughter, their lives become inextricably linked in unforeseen ways, as they move from distrust to friendship, and friendship to love.

Sampath Chawla's family thinks that he will never amount to anything, but overnight he becomes a holy man in their village, and his fame turns both his family's and his own life upside down.

Fifteen-year-old half Hindu, half Sikh Maya, having traveled from Canada to New Delhi to put her mother's ashes in their final resting place, finds herself in the middle of chaos after Indira Gandhi is assassinated and must disguise her identity and rely on a boy she just met in order to be reunited with her father and remain safe.

Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan--charismatic and impulsive--finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother's political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America.

Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence. He grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India's 1,000 other "midnight's children," all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness transports us across a subcontinent on a journey of many years. It takes us deep into the lives of its gloriously rendered characters, each of them in search of a place of safety--in search of meaning, and of love. In a graveyard outside the walls of Old Delhi, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby suddenly appears, just after midnight. In a snowy valley, a bereaved father writes a letter to his five-year-old daughter about the people who came to her funeral. In a second-floor apartment, a lone woman chain-smokes as she reads through her old notebooks. At the Jannat Guest House, two people who have known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around each other, as though they have just met. A braided narrative of astonishing force and originality, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once a love story and a provocation--a novel as inventive as it is emotionally engaging.

A portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.

Valli has always been afraid of the lepers living on the other side of the train tracks in the coal town of Jharia, India, so when a chance encounter with a doctor reveals she also has leprosy, Valli rejects help and begins an uncertain life on the streets.

A reinterpretation of the ancient Indian epic the "Mahabharat," in which Panchaali, a child destined to change history, marries all five Pandava brothers and builds the magnificent Palace of Illusions, only to have her spiritual failings lead them all to the brink of disaster.

Ram Mohammad Thomas has been arrested-for answering twelve questions correctly on TV's Who Will Win a Billion? Ram has never gone to school. He has never read a newspaper. There is no way a poor orphan from Jimmy's Bar could know the names of the planets or the plays of Shakespeare. Unless he cheated. Rescued from his police cell by a lawyer, Ram reviews television footage of his flawless performance and takes us on an amazing tour of his life growing up in Asia's biggest slum-from the day he is salvaged from a garbage can, to his employment with a faded Bollywood star, to working as an over-creative tour guide at the Taj Mahal, to falling in love with Nita, a young prostitute. With a fable-like narrative zapped with a witty 21st-century sensibility, Q & A is a darkly comic and charming novel that delves beneath its compelling premise to examine life's profound dilemmas. Brilliantly conceived and executed, Q & A paints an enthralling picture of humanity in all its guises.

On the eve of the monsoons, in a remote Indian village, Kavita gives birth to a baby girl. But in a culture that favors sons, the only way for Kavita to save her newborn daughter's life is to give her away. It is a decision that will haunt her and her husband for the rest of their lives, even after the arrival of their cherished son. Halfway around the globe, Somer, an American doctor, decides to adopt a child after making the wrenching discovery that she will never have one of her own. When she and her husband, Krishnan, see a photo of the baby with the gold-flecked eyes from a Mumbai orphanage, they are overwhelmed with emotion. Somer knows life will change with the adoption but is convinced that the love they already feel will overcome all obstacles.

Presents a novel based upon the life of the author about Lin, an escaped convict who disappears into the dark side of Bombay's streets and enters into a life of murder and betrayal, prison and torture, and war.

Presents a moral allegory, set in ancient India, about one soul's quest for the ultimate answer to the enigma of man's role in the world and features the hero, Siddhartha, who undergoes a series of experiences to emerge in a state of peace and wisdom.

1993 Bombay is on the verge of being torn apart by racial violence. Ten-year old Chamdi has rarely ventured outside his orphanage, and entertains an idyllic fantasy of what the city is like. But when he runs away to search for his father, he is thrust into the chaos of the streets.

When a note placed in a delivered lunch tin--a tiffin--is lost, Kunal is separated from his birth mother and ends up living as a slave. While learning to deliver tiffins with the help of a friendly old deliveryman, Kunal hatches a plan that could reunite him with his mother and give him a better life.

Southern India in the late 1800s. As the first girl born to the Nachimada family in over 60 years, Devi is the object of adoration of her entire family. Strong-willed and confident, she befriends the shy Devanna, a young boy whose mother has died. The two quickly become inseparable, until Devi meets Machu the tiger killer, a hunter of great repute. Soon they fall deeply in love, an attraction that drives a wedge between Devi and Devanna. It is this tangled relationship among the three that leads to a devastating tragedy-- an event that forever changes their fates and has unforeseen consequences for generations to come.

Examines and provides real-life accounts of urban poor families living in Bombay, India.

At only five years old, Saroo Brierley got lost on a train in India. Unable to read or write or recall the name of his hometown or even his own last name, he survived alone for weeks on the rough streets of Calcutta before ultimately being transferred to an agency and adopted by a couple in Australia. Always wondered about his origins, and with the advent of Google Earth, he had the opportunity to look for the needle in a haystack he once called home. After years of searching, he miraculously found what he was looking for and set off to find his family. A young man rediscovers not only his childhood life and home, but an identity long-since left behind.

The author shares memories of her life and family in South India and in America, and includes traditional Indian recipes.

Describes the daily life, religion, art, and rituals of ancient India.

A compelling and visually stunning guide to the rich diversity of life in India. Photographs show fascinating customs and rituals together with exquisite artworks, artifacts, and temples--offering a unique "eyewitness" of the intriguing nation.

The expansion of the Mughal Empire throughout India during the 16th and 17th centuries is traced through its decline in the 18th century and the subsequent rise of the British Raj and its influence on India up to the mid-19th century.

Song of India: Tales of Travel and Transformation, is a collection of 10 travel stories inspired by the scorched earth of the Rajasthan desert; the hypnotic currents of India’s most sacred river; the om-inspiring spectacle of the sunrise reflected against the white wall of the Himalayan mountain range in Darjeeling; the masses of people at the world’s largest spiritual gathering; and the intense, smoke-filled darkness of a night facing death on the river in Varanasi.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, called Mahatma (“great soul”), was the father of modern India, but his influence has spread well beyond the subcontinent and is as important today as it was in the first part of the twentieth century and during this nation’s own civil rights movement. Taken from Gandhi’s writings throughout his life, The Essential Gandhi introduces us to his thoughts on politics, spirituality, poverty, suffering, love, non-violence, civil disobedience, and his own life. The pieces collected here, with explanatory head notes by Gandhi biographer Louis Fischer, offer the clearest, most thorough portrait of one of the greatest spiritual leaders the world has known.

A biography of Mohandas Gandhi, the world's most revered champion of nonviolent civil disobedience and his assassination on January 30, 1948.

Presents a collection of articles offering various opinions about the military relations of India and Pakistan.

Explores India's transformation from a developing country into a global powerhouse influencing film, politics, world culture, and the global economy.