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India Today

CURRENT ISSUE JULY 09, 2007

SOCIETY & THE ARTS: BOOKS

Summer Chase

Conspiracy and identity crisis make this novel a page-turner

By Bunny Suraiya

IT ISN’T EASY BEING TAZ
By Dawood Ali McCallum
Penguin
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 309

At the crux of this tale is the problem of identity. Identity lost, mistaken, concealed and mixed. Tasneem Dharwalla alias Taz Dhar, first-generation British whose family fled Amin’s Uganda, and a functional alcoholic, has come to Mumbai to work as a news anchor for a television channel. On the day she gets fired for substance abuse, she receives a letter from someone who has found her picture, cut from a television guide. The writer is scheduled to be executed in an unknown African prison and has chosen to write his last letter to a face from the media, Taz. His name is Armitage Shanks—a name found on toilets throughout Britain and its erstwhile empire. But newspaper and Internet sources report no such execution having taken place and no one by such a name seems ever to have existed.

Taz persuades her boss (by dint of some rather amateurish blackmail) to sponsor her pursuit of this mysterious story. This results in a breathless chase that takes her from England to Ethiopia to Ghana, to Gambia, back to England and finally to India, pursued by threats, sinister phone calls and dire warnings to abandon her quest. Fuzzy-headed and drunk much of the time, Taz is not able to give up what has rapidly become an obsession, and the plot thickens into an unlikely international conspiracy that she, more by luck than skill, manages to unravel.

A decided page-turner, this book makes for enjoyable summer holiday reading, but could have done with tighter editing; there are tiresome longueurs when Taz is in her drunken fugues, but the characters are well-rounded and, much praise to the author, none of the Indians speaks like Peter Sellers

TOP 10 BESTSELLERS

A monthly national list of bestselling books compiled for INDIA TODAY by ORG-MARG based on data from 15 retail outlets in six cities.

FICTION

NO. TITLE AUTHOR PUBLISHER

1. (20) The Witch of Portobello Paulo Coelho HarperCollins

2. (-) Five Point Someone: What Not to Do At IIT Chetan Bhagat Rupa

3. (4) The Namesake Jhumpa Lahiri HarperCollins

4. (1) The Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai Penguin

5. (-) One Night @ the Call Centre Chetan Bhagat Rupa

NON-FICTION
NO. TITLE AUTHOR PUBLISHER

1. (1) It Happened in India Kishore Biyani, Dipayan Baishya Rupa

2. (5) The Secret Rhonda Byrne Atria

3. (15) Screw It, Let’s Do it Richard Branson Virgin

4. (4) Dhirubhaism A.G. Krishnamurthy Tata McGraw-Hill

5. (3) The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari Robin S. Sharma Jaico

OTHER INDIAN BOOKS IN THE TOP 20

FICTION
NO. TITLE AUTHOR PUBLISHER

7. (9) Above Average Amitabha Bagchi HarperCollins

8. (7) Shantaram Gregory David Roberts Penguin

NON-FICTION
NO. TITLE AUTHOR PUBLISHER

6. (19) India After Gandhi Ramachandra Guha Picador

7. (6) Dabbawalas Shrinivas Pandit Tata McGraw-Hill

8. (8) The Greatness Guide Robin S. Sharma Jaico

9. (11) Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found Suketu Mehta Penguin

11. (18) India’s Politics: A View From the Back Bench Bimal Jalan Penguin

12. (9) Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, his People and an Empire Rajmohan Gandhi Penguin

Last month’s rating in brackets
Participating bookshops: Delhi: Om Book Shop, Faqir Chand, Teksons, Full Circle; Mumbai: Crossword, Shah Book Stall, Danai Book Shop; Bangalore: Fountainhead, Gangarams; Hyderabad: Walden Book Link, The Book Point; Kolkata: Oxford Books, Modern Book Depot, Family Book Shop; Chennai: Fountainhead

Index

India Today


CURRENT ISSUE JULY 09, 2007

IN THIS ISSUE
	COVER STORY

	Embarrassing Choice Fight Of The Patriarch
	OTHER STORIES
	Poor Little Rich Girl Comrades In Sleaze Extremism Of Another Kind Comrades In Sleaze Extremism Of Another Kind No Shackles To Learning The Race For The $100 PC The Private Arms Race Russian Roulette Living On The Edge Now Banking On Indians The Boss Root Cause Eyewitness To History Summer Chase A New Clean Slate Couture Clash

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