What the books are about

Nepal Lonely Planet :

Shangri-la exists. Trek to the top of the world, or share a smile with a Buddhist monk; raft down a mountain gorge, or glimpse a living Hindu goddess — in Nepal adventure and culture go hand in hand. With this definitive guide, you’ll tread lightly through the best of the Himalayas.

The Alchemy of Desire :

Throughout the novel, Tejpal’s sensuous language produces moments of breathtaking beauty...” “A memorable and impressive debut.” Tarun Tejpal has enjoyed a 20-year career as a highly influential senior journalist and publisher. He was the editor of both India Today and Outlook, India’s premier news magazine. He has written for a number of international publications, including the Paris Review, The Guardian, the Financial Times and Prospect magazine. He lives in New Delhi.

1968: The Year That Rocked... :

It was the year of sex and drugs and rock and roll. It was also the year of the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, the Chicago Convention, The Tet Offensive, the French student rebellion, Civil Rights, the generation gap, the birth of the Women’s movement and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. In 1968, Mark Kurlansky has recorded the cultural and political history of a world changing year in which television’s influence on global events first became apparent and spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously all around the world.

One Shot :

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers always have remarkably inventive setups, and One Shot is true to form. A sniper, Barr, kills five people with six shots and leaves a clear trail of evidence; arrested, he asks for Reacher. When Reacher was a military policeman, politics stopped him pursuing Barr — he cannot understand why Barr would ask for him and Barr has been beaten in jail until he cannot remember himself. Yet, for Reacher, the loner who looks at things differently from civilians, the story does not add up — Barr should not have got himself caught, should not even have fired from where he did. Child is a master of the perverse solution to the set of questions no-one ever asked in quite that way before, and the macho yet sensitive Reacher is one of the more interesting series characters in thrillers. One Shot is a smart set of puzzles which strings the reader along to false conclusions and a sense of real danger. It also, like its hero, has a heart.

Human traces :

Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men and women really are. Jacques Rebiere and Thomas Midwinter, both 16 when the story starts in 1876, come from different countries and contrasting families. They are united by an ambition to understand how the mind works and whether madness is the price we pay for being human. As psychiatrists, they travel on a quest from the squalour of the Victorian lunatic

asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. Their search is made urgent by the case of Jacques’ brother Olivier, for whose severe illness no name has yet been found.

Thomas’ sister Sonia becomes the pivotal figure in the volatile relationship between the two men. It threatens to explode with the arrival in their Austrian sanatorium of an enigmatic patient, Fraulein Katharina von A, whose illness epitomises all that divides them. As the concerns of the old century fade and the First World War divides Europe, the novel rises to a climax in which the value of being alive is called into question.

I am Charlotte Simmons :

Dupont University — the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America’s youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition — or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from Sparta, North Carolina, who has come here on a full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns that for the upper-crust coeds of Dupont, sex, cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time. As Charlotte encounters Dupont’s elite, she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence. But little does she realise that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.