Raoul Bhaneja has narrated 6 audiobooks on Listento.it by 6 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 35 ratings. The most-rated is A Delhi Obsession.
A Delhi Obsession
Summary
Two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji returns with a powerful new novel about grief and second chances, tradition and rebellion, set in vibrant present-day Delhi. Munir Khan, a recent widower from Toronto, on a whim decides to visit Delhi, the city of his forbears. Born in Kenya, he has lost all family connections, and has never visited India before. While sitting in the bar of the Delhi Recreational Club where he's staying, an attractive woman joins his table to await her husband. A sparring match ensues. The two are from different worlds: Munir is a westernized agnostic of Muslim origin; Mohini, a modern Hindu woman. Utterly witty and charming, she's religiously traditional, but also a liberal and provocative newspaper columnist. Against her better judgment, Mohini agrees to show Munir around the city. As they explore the thriving markets and historical buildings of Old Delhi, an inexplicable attraction begins. What follows is a passionate love affair - uncontrollable yet impossible. This is a period of rising Indian nationalism in modern India that at times finds outlet in senseless violence. Constantly lurking at Munir's Club is the menacing and foreboding presence of a fanatical nationalist group. To them Munir Khan is simply a Muslim "love-jihadi" who has led the pride of Hindu womanhood, Mohini Singh, astray. At what cost, their passion?
©2019 M.G. Vassanji (P)2019 Doubleday Canada
Funny Boy
Summary
In this remarkable debut novel, a boy’s bittersweet passage to maturity and sexual awakening is set against escalating political tensions in Sri Lanka, during the seven years leading up to the 1983 riots. Arjie Chelvaratnam is a Tamil boy growing up in an extended family in Colombo. It is through his eyes that the story unfolds and we meet a delightful, sometimes eccentric cast of characters. Arjie’s journey from the luminous simplicity of childhood days into the more intricately shaded world of adults - with its secrets, its injustices, and its capacity for violence - is a memorable one, as time and time again the true longings of the human heart are held against the way things are. “A powerful and beautifully written novel....” (Literary Review (UK))
©2013 Shyam Selvadurai (P)2019 McClelland & Stewart
Seven
Summary
When Sharifa and her husband travel to India, she expects her time will be spent researching her great-great grandfather, a wealthy businessman and philanthropist. However, what she doesn’t expect is to be swept up in the story of his four wives, oddly excluded from her family history. As Sharifa’s imagination is overtaken with these four women, she finds herself in the middle of another female-centered conflict - a conservative, religious ritual that has been going on for centuries. Khatna, or the act of female genital cutting, may be an age-old tradition, but women in India are now taking opposite sides, including Sharifa’s two favorite cousins. As she tries to find a middle ground, Sharifa’s research excavates an unexpected truth, one that will force her to take a position in this rich novel about resistance and finding your way between cultural traditions and modern values.
©2020 Farzana Doctor (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada
This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart
Summary
"Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader....This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual tour de force." (Jane Urquhart) An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present. We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter's tale - we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father's leg, the virus of a mother's rage, makes its way to the next generation. Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history, and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the listener in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.
©2020 Madhur Anand (P)2020 Strange Light
Afterlife Crisis
Summary
For fans of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and P. G. Wodehouse. Where do you go after you die? Detroit. Something’s rotten in the afterlife. At least that’s how it seems to Rhinnick Feynman, the one man who perceives that someone in the afterlife is tugging at history’s threads and retroactively unraveling the past. Doing his best to navigate a netherworld in which history won’t stop changing for the worse, Rhinnick sets off on a quest to put things right. This would be a good deal easier if Rhinnick didn’t believe he was a character in a novel and that the author was changing the past through editorial revision. And it’d be better if Rhinnick didn’t find himself facing off against Isaac Newton, Jack the Ripper, ancient Egyptians, a pack of frenzied Napoleons, and the prophet Norm Stradamus. Come to think of it, it’d be nice if Rhinnick could manage to steer clear of the afterlife’s mental health establishment and a bevy of unexpected fiancées. Undeterred by these terrors, Rhinnick recognizes himself as the Man the Hour Produced and the only one equipped to outwit the forces of science and mental health.
©2020 Randal Graham (P)2020 ECW Press
Coconut Dreams
Summary
Coconut Dreams explores the lives of the Pinto family through 17 linked short stories. Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various time lines and perspectives to focus on two children, Aiden and Ally Pinto. These siblings tackle their adventures in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence, and a timid foot in two distinct cultures. Derek Mascarenhas takes a fresh look at the world of the new immigrant and the South Asian experience in Canada. In these stories, a daughter questions her father's love at an IKEA grand opening; an aunt remembers a safari gone wrong in Kenya; an uncle's unrequited love is confronted at a Goan Association picnic; a boy tests his faith amid a schoolyard brawl; and a childhood love letter is exchanged during the building of a backyard deck. Singularly and collectively, these stories will move the listener with their engaging narratives and authentic voices.
©2019 Derek Mascarenhas (P)2020 Book*hug