Kevein Books and Reviews

We are back with another author interview. Today, we have with us Priyanka Agarwal—the author of PiKu & ViRu. Priyanka talks about her writing aspirations, the route to getting her book published, and her inclination towards contemporary fiction. Stay on while we chat with her.
Image Credit: Sonika Agarwal Though you come from content-writing background, what motivates you to write fiction? To be honest, I had no idea I’d ever write fiction. In fact, I remember the day eight years ago when I was updating my LinkedIn profile and I wondered how the likes of J.K. Rowling had such a vivid imagination. I still expressed a dream in my profile to write fiction, though I had no clue how that would happen. But gradually, I learned that fiction comes out of our own experiences, thoughts and feelings, which every author expresses artistically and imaginatively. Most importantly, you need to have a good story to bind all this in. When that happened with me, I didn’t think twice before pennin…

It is a story about courage, loss, adventure and tragedy. Prashant is a nineteen-year-old boy, who one day goes to Ersama – a coastal town 18 kilometers away from his village Kalikuda – to meet his friend. In the evening torrential rain and storm surrounds the town, the rain is so heavy, along with strong gales of wind, that water enters the homes of people and trees begin uprooting. Overall, life becomes tough; people are scared to the hell. To avoid water in the home Prashant and his friend’s family move on the roof of the home, as it was a brick and mortar home. In rain and wind and storm, they spend almost two days there, struggling for warmth and food, thanks to one coconut tree that is lying on their roof, which provided them food.

From the roof Prashant sees the streets flooded and corpses of humans and animals and trees being afloat. The super cyclone has caused havoc all around. He is worried about his family members, though his mother had died seven years ago. There are his…

Piku & Viru is the debut novel of Priyanka Agarwal. As the tagline says, ‘A Fan-Actor Drama’, indeed the story of the novel revolves around a fan and her celebrity crush. We often come across romance novels where either one-sided or two-sided affairs take place. However, a common ‘somebody’ going after a celebrity and forming interesting conflict of interests is something rarity. By all means, it is a romance novel in which one of the partner struggles way harder than the other.

The story is staged against the charming hubbub of Mumbai. It is a long story, so you need to settle down comfortably while getting moved along with the brisk pace of the novel. In our opinion, the author has deliberately given low weightage to female protagonist Piyanjali aka Piku as compared to Vian Rustom aka Viru. Probably, she had in mind that the story is between two very uncommon people. A simple girl trying to snatch a piece of pie from the glamorous world. We heard people falling and chasing each…

To many this book may sound another warts and all self-help book for boosting confidence in life. Well, you need to think again. As the title suggests, it is aptly right to say that once you gain confidence, well then no miracle is impossible for you. To take the things further, let us clear that this is a fiction book based on a student’s plight to study fruitfully to clear the world’s toughest exam CA.

Our protagonist Pancham is a CA final year student. The story starts with a failure. He, much contrary to his parents and self-expectations, has failed in the CA exams. It was his first attempt. He feels the heat of the pressure all the more as everyone in his family had cleared the exam in first attempt. He is depressed. What should he do now? Try harder or commit suicide. On a depressing side, he thinks of suicide. For a change of mind and heart, his mother sends him to a nearby Gurudwara.
In Gurudwara, he stumbles upon a smiling man, who sounded strange and weird to Pancham. Despi…

The Accidental Tourist by Bill Bryson is a short story that highlights the importance of having suave and elegant manners at the time of travelling. In this story, we see that the narrator almost flies over 100,000 miles every year because of his job’s nature. So, we can say that the narrator is an accidental tourist, though he doesn’t enjoy travelling but still he has to because of his job. However in his own words he says that he is sort of a confused man who often forgets the roads and gets into wrong alleys or gets trapped into self-locking doors. In this story, he takes us to some of his awry travel experiences where he did some crazy things, though unwittingly.
Most of his experiences are based around airports or inside the flights. On one instant, while flying to England from Boston with family for Christmas, he forcibly opened the zip of his bag, as a result it broke down and all the stuff littered on the ground. This made him embarrassed and the people around him.
One day in…

Blogging for Gold by Anuj Tikku is an e-book in which you will get A to Z knowledge about blogging. Though the main aspect of this book is to dole out blogging knowledge to new or aspiring bloggers, however Anuj has also brought in social media, self-publishing, writing a book, and many other helpful topics with commendable confidence. As the title goes, ‘Blogging for Gold’, he means to say that blogging means digging gold but only a handful of people knows that to get gold one has to work hard while having a good amount of patience. Blogging can give you money and fame and an office-free life, but the route to that glory isn’t that easy you might have thought-out.

Anuj Tikku hails from Bollywood, in fact a popular face, and apart from this, he is also a prolific travel blogger for over two years with his blog: www.tikkustravelthon.in. Inquisitive enough, you can Google him. From a travel blogger’s point of view, this e-book is a treasure trove, Anuj has shared about his work and dif…