On the shelf

— Vidya Shivadas

One Last Mirror
By Andrew Harvey
Penguin
Price: Rs 200

IT is an unusual love story between 70-year-old Sri Lankan heiress Savitri and a British homosexual David, who is a little more than one-third her age. She is acerbic about her life and that of those around her. He is on a predictable self-discovery mission in the East. But the connection between them is immediate. They can talk about their fears, their dreams, their failures without using any arts. Savi is vain enough to want David to want her, think she is beautiful, yet self-aware that she is only a short stop in his journey. She and David constantly force each other to see their reflection in the mirror and face the truth.

First published in the US in 1985, the book uses quotations from the Dhammapada. It was the Coimbatore-born author’s first novel. Harvey, incidentally is best remembered for his A Journey in Ladakh, which became something of a cult book in the eighties and nineties.

— Puja Birla

Women Who Dared
Edited by Ritu Menon
NBT, Price: Rs 75

These are not the women you bump into at Page Six parties, yet they are, to borrow the cliche, women of substance. But we come across some interesting terms in the book. Romila Thapar has been introduced as a “public intellectual”, and the brief introduction to the Sonal Mansingh chapter says the dancer “is an unparalleled representative of the ancient”.

— Tina Das