RAG Demo

Tag: Novella

  • Ghachar Ghochar

    The narrator, an unnamed young man in Bangalore, spends his afternoons at a coffee house watching the world and taking advice from a waiter named Vincent. He lives with his parents, his sister Malati and his uncle Chikkappa, whose spice trading business lifted the family from a cramped, ant-infested rented house into a bigger home and an easy life.

    The narrator nominally works for the business but does nothing; the family depends on Chikkappa and protects him fiercely. When the narrator marries Anita, a woman with firm principles who refuses to accept how things are done, her presence exposes the family's moral compromises and the quiet menace that holds it together.

    Vivek Shanbhag's novella, originally written in Kannada and translated into English by Srinath Perur, is short, wry and precise, with tension built from small domestic details. It drew international praise when it appeared in the UK and US in 2017, and its title is a made-up phrase for something hopelessly entangled.

    Book details

    AuthorVivek Shanbhag
    First published2013
    Original languageKannada
    Translated bySrinath Perur
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)118
    SettingBangalore, early 21st century

    Themes

    • Money and morality
    • Family loyalty
    • Class mobility
    • Complicity
    • Marriage

    Who should read it

    Readers who like short, unsettling literary fiction about how money reshapes a family.

  • Fire on the Mountain

    After a lifetime as the dutiful wife of a university vice-chancellor and mother of many children, Nanda Kaul has retreated to Carignano, an isolated house on a ridge in Kasauli. She wants nothing more than to be left alone with the pines and the view, and she resents any letter or visitor that might pull her back into obligation.

    Then her great-granddaughter Raka is sent to recover from typhoid and a troubled home. To Nanda's surprise, the child wants no attention at all and spends her days roaming ravines and burnt hillsides. Nanda finds herself trying to win the girl over with invented stories, while Ila Das, a childhood friend reduced to poverty, brings news of the dangers of the world below.

    Short and intense, the novel is a study of solitude, female lives and the pretences people build to survive them. It won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award, and its quiet build-up gives way to a powerful, unsettling conclusion best discovered without warning.

    Book details

    AuthorAnita Desai
    First published1977
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)145
    SettingCarignano, a house in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, 1970s
    AwardsWinifred Holtby Memorial Prize 1978, Sahitya Akademi Award 1978

    Themes

    • Solitude
    • Women's lives
    • Old age and childhood
    • Illusion
    • Loneliness

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy short, psychologically intense novels about women and solitude.

  • The Blue Umbrella

    Binya lives with her mother and brother in a small village in the Garhwal hills, where she grazes the family's two cows. One day a group of picnickers from the plains admire her lucky leopard-claw pendant, and she exchanges it for a frilly blue umbrella that becomes the most admired object in the valley.

    Ram Bharosa, the elderly owner of the village tea shop, cannot stop thinking about the umbrella. When Binya refuses to sell it, his envy pushes him into scheming, and the consequences ripple through the small community, testing ideas of fairness, pride and forgiveness. Children in the village take sides as the rivalry grows.

    This novella is one of Ruskin Bond's best-known stories for children, told with simple, clear prose and a sharp sense of mountain life: weather, wildflowers and village gossip. Vishal Bhardwaj adapted it into a National Award-winning Hindi film in 2005, with Pankaj Kapur as the shopkeeper.

    Book details

    AuthorRuskin Bond
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreChildren's
    TypeFiction
    SettingA village in the Garhwal hills, Uttarakhand

    Themes

    • Envy and greed
    • Forgiveness
    • Village community
    • Childhood

    Who should read it

    Children aged eight and up, and parents looking for a short read-aloud with a gentle moral.

  • Of Mice and Men

    George Milton and Lennie Small travel together through California during the Great Depression, picking up work on farms and ranches. George is small, sharp and impatient; Lennie is enormously strong but has an intellectual disability and a childlike love of soft things. They arrive at a ranch near Soledad after trouble forced them out of their last job.

    What keeps them going is a dream they repeat like a bedtime story: a small farm of their own, with a few acres, a vegetable patch and rabbits for Lennie to tend. On the ranch they meet the ageing swamper Candy, the isolated stable hand Crooks, the boss's aggressive son Curley and Curley's restless young wife, each of them lonely in their own way.

    Steinbeck built the short novel almost like a play, with tight scenes, heavy dialogue and few settings, and he later adapted it for the stage. Its power lies in how much it compresses: friendship, loyalty, the precariousness of itinerant labour and the way hope sustains people with little else. It is one of the most widely read books in American schools.

    Book details

    AuthorJohn Steinbeck
    First published1937
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)107
    SettingA ranch near Soledad, Salinas Valley, California, 1930s

    Themes

    • Friendship
    • Loneliness
    • The American Dream
    • Disability
    • Powerlessness

    Who should read it

    Anyone wanting a short, emotionally powerful classic that can be read in an afternoon and remembered for years.

  • The Old Man and the Sea

    Santiago is an old fisherman in a village near Havana who has gone eighty-four days without catching anything. The other fishermen consider him unlucky, and the parents of Manolin, the boy who once fished with him, have sent the boy to another boat. Manolin still looks after the old man, bringing him food and talking baseball with him.

    On the eighty-fifth day Santiago rows farther out than usual and hooks an enormous marlin that is too strong to haul in. For days the fish tows his small skiff across the open sea while Santiago, his hands cut and cramping, holds the line, talks to himself and to the fish, and thinks about his youth, his strength and the great baseball player Joe DiMaggio.

    Hemingway's style here is pared to the bone, with plain sentences and close physical detail of rope, water, hunger and pain. The novella is often read as a parable about endurance, pride and the dignity of struggle regardless of outcome. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was singled out when Hemingway received the Nobel Prize the following year.

    Book details

    AuthorErnest Hemingway
    First published1952
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)127
    SettingA fishing village near Havana and the Gulf Stream, Cuba
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction 1953

    Themes

    • Endurance
    • Pride
    • Man versus nature
    • Ageing
    • Friendship across generations

    Who should read it

    Readers looking for a short, intense classic about perseverance, told in famously economical prose.

  • The Metamorphosis

    Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who supports his parents and younger sister with a job he hates, wakes one morning to discover that he has turned into an enormous insect-like creature. His first worries are not about his body but about missing his train and angering his employer, whose chief clerk soon arrives at the family flat to ask why he is late.

    The story then follows how the Samsa household reorganises itself around Gregor, who is confined to his room. His sister Grete at first brings him food and tries to understand what he likes, while his father reacts with violence. As money grows tight, the family takes in lodgers and returns to work, and Gregor listens from behind his door as their feelings toward him shift.

    Kafka tells the bizarre premise in a calm, matter-of-fact style that makes it more unsettling. Published in German in 1915, the novella has been read as a parable of alienation, of the dehumanising effect of work, of family duty and of illness and disability. It is one of the most influential short works of the twentieth century.

    Book details

    AuthorFranz Kafka
    First published1915
    Original languageGerman
    Translated byWilla and Edwin Muir
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)70
    SettingThe Samsa family flat in an unnamed city, early 20th century

    Themes

    • Alienation
    • Family duty
    • Identity
    • Work and dehumanisation
    • Absurdity

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a short, strange and haunting classic that rewards rereading and discussion.