Kevein Books and Reviews

Arya’s Hunting Ground by Arvind Narsima is a riveting crime thriller, featuring Arya as a lead protagonist cum investigator. Those who have read previous novels (The Aravan Head & The Chosen One) of the author will have no difficulty resonating with Arya and his peculiar working style. Published by BookMedia, the novel is set against Puducherry and Chennai’s criminal grounds. Before Arya could come into the picture, the author took his time to explain the dreadful crimes that happen there, such as murder, torture and rape of women and girls. One of the poignant efforts of this book is to appeal to make India a rape free country. The lead character Arya hates rapists more than anything. The book is divided into two parts: Chennai and Puducherry. At both places some heinous crimes have happened, which the author used as a preface to the overall novel.Leaving the introductory crime cases, the main story starts with the murder of a famous singer Jeyanth. He was married to Ananya – the …

A Stranger is Following Me by Sunil Vaishnava is a riveting, semi-dark psychological thriller. The novel takes a classic stance on desires and lust for money. No matter how perfect someone becomes, but there is always something that is amiss and it keeps haunting that person. The title of the book is subjective and resonated well with the overall themes and characters. The novel features three stories–one from the past, and two in the present. They are of different people but connected. When their stories intermingle they find themselves standing against one another at cross roads. As a reader, you will keep reading three stories and thinking them as different, but post midway when they begin converging to a point, you will realize their power and the brilliance of the author.The novel opens up with Jai Dev Vasist. He is highly successful in one of the companies. He started as an executive and went to on to become the CEO of the company. He is a workaholic and had been a fitness freak.…

Lockdown Narratives: Four Short Stories. Four Lockdowns by Durjoy Choudhury is an engaging book with stories based on quarantines and lockdowns and other situations where humans were forced to take backseat.
In total there are four stories, one is about Covid-19, second is about clampdown in Kashmir, third is historical fiction, set in 1918 when influenza was causing havoc in European countries, and the last one is futuristic – set in 2032 – it depicts how life will be when we all are surrounded by machines and robots in a time when humans cannot see or touch each other.The first story – 956, 5th, Ave – is a story about two friends. Once they were in the same school in India. Nafeez and Oishi. The former is based in the USA, and the later is settled in Kolkata, India. The guy Nafeez writes to Oishi when Covid starts hitting the USA severely. They chat via emails. They inform each other about the pandemic situation from their countries or regions. At Nafeez’s side, Covid takes a disastr…

Dear Mr Bachchan: A Bollywood Story by Saurav Dutt is an interesting and unique fictional tale that seems like a work of non-fiction. The story features a twelve-year-old boy from the slums of Dharavi, Mumbai. Being in Mumbai, he is fascinated by the charm of legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan. The boy is Vikram ‘Don’ Chopra. He is so much awed by the movie Don (of Mr. Bachchan) that he uses Don as his middle name. As father, as son, he learnt watching Mr Bachchan’s movies from his father, who died in a car accident in Mumbai. He misses his father and finds solace while watching Bachchan movies. As one delves deeper, it is evident that the boy had great bonding with his father. It was his father who talked about dreams, their source emanated from movies. The backdrop of the novel is fascinating. To make it more surreal and optimistic, the author deliberately chose Mumbai as the major city in the novel. Vikram spends his time watching movies of Mr Bachchan and also works in a salon and po…

They'll Post Anything These Days by Kunal Sadana is a different yet riveting short book. It offers over 340 short to medium length posts that he scribbled on social media platforms over a period of time. The book indicates today one cannot deny that social media has become an integral part of our lives. It’s like mirror to our tenacity and thought process and at times circumstances that we go through. Since the early days of Orkut to mature evolution of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr – it has been a fad to post anything on these social media handles to collect response and attention and much more. However, think it in other way, someone is writing or posting there to have that feeling of catharsis. Posting on social media is now a trending fashion, not an awkward job anymore. So, this book brings the timeline of an author who used social media to publish a gamut of posts for a period as good as a decade. As one chugs ahead with the book, one gets a contemplative mood, and eventually…

The Seventh Cup by Nitesh Jain is a different-league murder mystery with amazing concepts in between. The story shuttles mainly between Switzerland and Goa, India. The novel doesn’t open with a murder or crime scene, rather in a typical way where a guy named Avinash Roy sips coffee at a frequented café, at a particular place in Zurich. Exactly at the seventh cup of his coffee, he gets into something clumsy that people around begins noticing him. Well, he is writing the last chapter of a book, ‘In Search of Truth’. This book is about conflict of Religion, Science, and Man. There at Zurich, in that café, Mr. Roy stumbles upon Verona Schmidt. He likes her. She teases him as SRK. At their meeting a lot of palaver about India and Bollywood goes on, as it was obvious as Verona was an aspiring actress. Anyway, there Mr. Roy plays with her by confusing her into Mind Transportation game. It is a lengthy novel, so the sub stories and sweeps in at are at crossroads. One needs to read this book in…