Girl with a Pearl Earring

Love Stories from the Mahabharata
by Subodh Ghosh

Erotic in style and content, this collection unearths the forgotten and lesser known tales of love from the great epic. In Love Stories, we get dignified women, battered by fate and their love for their men they do not lose a shred of their dignity in the process.

Parikshit and Sushobhana, Agni and Svaha, Agastya and Lopamudra, and many more lovelorn couples take us on a journey through the crosscurrents of physical desire and psychic union.

It is a translated section by Pradip Bhattacharya which take away nothing from the original, capture the interest of the reader and are praiseworthy in themselves.

Absolute Friends
by John le Carre

Absolute Friends, John le Carre delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carre fans have been waiting for, a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages.

The Tristan Betrayal
by Robert Ludlum

Moscow-a city under siege by hardcore Communists threatening to plunge the country back into Stalinist darkness. Into the heart of the firestorm, American ambassador Stephen Metcalf has been summoned to find the one man who controls the levers of power in absolute secrecy-an official known only as the Dirizhor. His support of the bloody coup will bring the entire world to the brink of nuclear war. Metcalfe is the only man with the cunning to reach him and to convince him to resist. It's up to Metcalf to change the course of history. He's done it before.

For Metcalf, returning to Russia is also a personal mission that will stretch across three continents and fifty years into his past where the loyalties of a former love-a woman both impossibly beautiful and possibly treacherous-were tested; where the shadow of a Nazi assassin still haunts; a debauched German aristocrat manipulated the destiny of everyone he touched. Now, as past and present converge, Metcalf braces himself for a new trial of trust and betrayal, one with chilling implications that could threaten what remains of the free world.