Author: Khushwant Singh
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1999
Language: English
Pages: 736
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140255664
Description
Now in paperback, this omnibus edition brings together the best works of one of India's most widely read and celebrated author.
Witty, eloquent, outrageous, and always entertaining, Khushwant Singh has acquired an iconic status as a writer and journalist. This omnibus edition brings together three of his novels written over four decades.
TRAIN TO PAKISTAN, Khushwant Singh's first novel, published in 12954, brought him instant fame. A powerful and moving account of the tragedy of Partition, set in the small Indian frontier village of Mano Majra, it is also the touching love story of a Sikh dacoit and a Muslim girl.
I SHALL NOT HEAR THE NIGHTINGALE, his second novel, deals with the conflict in a prosperous Sikh family living in Punjab in the mid 1940s. The father is a magistrate who works for the British, while the son dreams of glory as the leader of a terrorist group rebelling against foreign rule.
The best-selling DELHI, a vast, erotic, irreverent magnum opus centered on the Indian capital, is the third book in this anthology. The Principal narrator of the saga, which extends over six hundred years, is an aging reprobate who loves Delhi as much as he does the hijda whore Bhagmati. As he travels through time, space and history to 'discover' his beloved city, we find it transformed and immortalized in our minds for ever.
COMMENTS:
Khushwant Singh's phenomenal success as a writer springs from a most unwriterly virtue: he writes for the reader, not for himself. He has the knack of seeming to speak directly to the reader, shrugging himself out of the confines of the printed page. The Times of India
Contents
Introduction
Train to Pakistan
I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale
Delhi