For me, the most indispensable element in the aesthetic success of Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder is McCarthy's use of the novel's brain-damaged protagonist as its first-person narrator.(...)

But this emphasis on the narrator's "mind" is not quite right, although the seeming disorder of his mind (which, in my reading, at least, is actually an attempt to reassert order) is certainly pushed to the foreground of the novel he is (unwittingly) composing. We are not, as in most conventional "psychological realism," thrust "inside the narrator's head." We are thrust into his words, where we are, undeniably, caught up in the same obsessions and compulsions (...)

The Master and Margarita shows the folly of Soviet repression, but it does not stop at mere cynicism and irony. Bulgakov also illustrates that the devil might watch out for Jesus, and vice versa, i.e., there are more gray areas even in the scripture than one might ordinarily perceive.

The gripping plot surely helps with the read, but Bulgakov's genius is in the subtle theories and observations he advances throughout this page-turner, forcing a reader to think about what it all means as a grin maliciously spreads across his face.

About seven years ago, when she was 38, Rosemary Mahoney rowed down the Nile, alone, in a small skiff. ''What I wanted, really, was not just to seethe Nile River,'' she writes, ''but to sit in the middle of it in my own boat, alone.'' Whether she was deranged, courageous, or a little of both is a question that hangs over Down the Nile, her riveting account of the experience, a portrait of the artist as an obsessive, sunburned young woman and of the complicated male-dominated society that she encountered in that part of the world.

Using all these disparate sources, Darlymple succeeds in creating a masterpiece that challenges the existing theories about the Revolt. Instead of the single coherent mutiny or patriotic national war of independence beloved of Victorian or Indian nationalist historians, Darlymple says that there was in reality a chain of very different uprisings and acts of resistance that were determined by local and regional factors.

In another review, noted author Kushwant Singh writes

Dalrymple's book rouses deep emotions. It will bring tears to the eyes of every Dilliwala, among whom I count myself.

Readers interested in the book will also be interested in the piece "Rising, Falling" written by William Dalrymple offering a "a new look at one of Indian history's most enigmatic episodes, and its aftermath"

In just 279 pages we move from post-war Manhattan to Long Island in the 1970s, and from Mary and John's first coupling to the mistimed conception of their first grandchild.

But slowly, inexorably, we are drawn in by the power of the descriptive writing, and the gradual accumulation of insights. The almost-tragedy as Mary gives birth prematurely to her fourth child on the sitting-room sofa. The disorientation of the child whose mother suddenly is not at home, her presence unnervingly absent.

The horror of the teenage Annie as she watches her friend having an abortion, the white woven polyester of the nurse's cheap uniform etched on her mind.