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ID: 441975

Title: Heart: A History

Author: Sandeep Jauhar

Narrator: Rajiv Dadia

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7:45:02

Language: English

Release date: 04-07-20

Publisher: Random House (Audio)

Genres: Science & Technology, Medicine

Summary:

The spark of life, fount of emotion, house of the soul--the heart lies at the centre of every facet of our existence. It's so bound up in our deepest feelings that it can physically change shape when we experience emotional trauma.

For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As the cardiologist and bestselling author Sandeep Jauhar shows in Heart: A History, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that have changed the way we live.

Deftly alternating between key historical episodes and his own work, combining his family's own moving history of heart disease with gripping scenes from the operating theatre, Jauhar tells the colourful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ. He introduces us to Daniel Hale Williams, the African American doctor who performed the world's first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. We meet C. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient's circulatory system to a healthy donor's, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker?by accident. Jauhar deftly braids these tales of discovery, hubris, and sorrow with moving accounts of his family's history of heart ailments and the patients he's treated over many years. He also confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that future progress will depend more on how we choose to live than on the devices we invent.

Affecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.

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ID: 498567

Title: Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography

Author: Richa Kaul Padte

Narrator: Leeza Mangaldas

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7:42:25

Language: English

Release date: 04-07-20

Publisher: Random House (Audio)

Genres: Non-Fiction, Social Science

Summary:

In 1964, American judge Potter Stewart famously said, ‘I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.’ Over fifty years later, the reverberations of these words are still being felt across the world. Be it proposed porn bans, religious morality or women’s rights, the assumption is that porn has a single, knowable definition. But one man’s art is another woman’s erotica is another person’s sex tape.

 

In this intrepid, empathetic and nuanced account of the sexual shopping cart that is the internet today, Richa Kaul Padte takes readers on an intimate tour of online sex cultures. From camgirls to fanfiction writers, homemade videos to consent violations, Cyber Sexy investigates what it means to seek out pleasure online.

 

And as for whether or not something counts as porn? You’ll know it when you see it.

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ID: 441957

Title: For the Love of God: Women Poet Saints of the Bhakti Movement

Author: Sandhya Mulchandani

Narrator: Katie

Format: Unabridged

Length: 5:54:27

Language: English

Release date: 04-07-20

Publisher: Random House (Audio)

Genres: Religion & Spirituality, Hinduism

Summary:

Between the third centuries BC and AD were written thousands of verses in Tamil that have collectively come to be known as Sangam literature. The expressions of love between a man and a woman in these love poems gave way to passionate expressions of devotional love, where the heroine became the devotee and the hero became God. Through the centuries of patriarchy, women negotiated varied levels of existence and largely went unnoticed until they found a path for self-expression through bhakti or devotion. While the dominant form of worship was to prostrate before God, women found innovative ways of personal expression, often seeing the lord as a lover, friend, husband, or even son. The individual outpourings and the unfettered voices of these women refused to be drowned in the din of patriarchy gathering momentum until this became a pan India movement.

In For the Love of God, Sandhya Mulchandani delves deep into historical accounts of these women who fell in love with God.

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ID: 441978

Title: Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

Author: Bruno Macaes

Narrator: Anish Nair

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7:14:28

Language: English

Release date: 04-07-20

Publisher: Random House (Audio)

Genres: Global Politics

Summary:

China's Belt and Road strategy is acknowledged to be the most ambitious geopolitical initiative of the age. Covering almost seventy countries by land and sea, it will affect every element of global society from shipping to agriculture, digital economy to tourism and politics to culture. Most importantly, it symbolizes a new phase in China's ambitions as a superpower: to remake the world economy and crown Beijing as the new centre of capitalism and globalization.

Bruno Macaes traces this extraordinary initiative's history, highlighting its achievements to date and its staggering complexity. He asks whether Belt and Road is about more than power projection and profit. Will it herald a new set of universal political values, to rival those of the West? Is it, in fact, the story of the century?

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ID: 441977

Title: Midnight's Machines: A Political History of Technology in India

Author: Arun Mohan Sukumar

Narrator: Gaurav Marwahi

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9:52:53

Language: English

Release date: 04-07-20

Publisher: Random House (Audio)

Genres: Politics, History

Summary:

Every Prime Minister of independent India has guided, if not personally overseen, one prized portfolio: technology. If, in the early years, Nehru and his scientist-advisors retained an iron grip on it, subsequent governments created a bureaucracy that managed everything from the country's crown jewels-its nuclear and space programmes-to solar stoves and mechanized bullock carts.

But a lesser-known political project began on 15 August 1947: the Indian state's undertaking to influence what the citizens thought about technology and its place in society. Beneath its soaring rhetoric on the virtues or vices of technology, the state buried a grim reality: India's inability to develop it at home. The political class sent contradictory signals to the general public. On the one hand, they were asked to develop a scientific temper, on the other, to be wary of becoming enslaved to technology; to be thrilled by the spectacle of a space launch while embracing jugaad, frugal innovation, and the art of 'thinking small'. To mask its failure at building computers, the Indian state decried them in the seventies as expensive, job-guzzling machines. When it urged citizens to welcome them the next decade, the government was, unsurprisingly, met with fierce resistance. From Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi, India's political leadership has tried its best to modernize the nation through technology, but on its own terms and with little success.

In this engaging and panoramic history spanning the arc of modern India from the post-War years to present day, Arun Mohan Sukumar gives us the long view with a reasoned, occasionally provocative standpoint, using a lens that's wide enough for the frame it encompasses. With compelling arguments drawn from archival public records and open-source reportage, he unearths the reasons why India embraced or rejected new technologies, giving us a new way to understand and appreciate the individual moments that brought the country into the twenty-first century.

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ID: 498574

Title: Panty

Author: Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

Narrator: Mala Mangla

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6:24:56

Language: English

Release date: 04-07-20

Publisher: Random House (Audio)

Genres: Fiction & Literature, Literary Fiction

Summary:

Darkly glamorous and fiercely erotic heroines take the centre stage in these two novellas. In Panty, when a mysterious young woman arrives in Calcutta and moves into a guesthouse, she finds in an otherwise empty wardrobe a soft and silky panty in leopard-skin print. She thinks the woman who wore it must have possessed a wild sexual nature. A sensation of companionship envelops her; the sexual lives of the two women begin to mingle and blur.

 

In Hypnosis, another young woman—a TV journalist on perpetual night duty—has an unconsummated but passionate affair with a famous musician that leaves her shattered. In a nightmarish sequence of events that follow, she allows herself to be hypnotized and drugged to aid her search for love.

 

Exposing our darkest desires and deepest fears when it comes to love, the effect of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s ferocious storytelling is deliciously anarchic and deeply unsettling.

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ID: 441965

Title: People's History of Heaven

Author: Mathangi Subramanian

Narrator: Pallavi Bharati

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9:39:44

Language: English

Release date: 04-07-20

Publisher: Random House (Audio)

Genres: Fiction & Literature, Contemporary Women

Summary:

Heaven is a thirty-year-old slum hidden between brand-new, high-rise apartment buildings and technology incubators in contemporary Bangalore. In this tight-knit community, five girls on the cusp of womanhood-a politically driven graffiti artist; a transgender Christian convert; a blind girl who loves to dance; and the queer daughter of a hijabi union leader-forge an unbreakable bond.

When the local government threatens to demolish their tin shacks in order to build a shopping mall, the girls and their mothers refuse to be erased. Together they wage war on the bulldozers sent to bury their homes, and, ultimately, on the city that wishes that families like them would remain hidden forever.

Elegant, poetic, and vibrant, A People's History of Heaven takes a clear-eyed look at adversity and geography and dazzles in its depiction of love and female friendship.

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ID: 441981

Title: Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India

Author: Harsh Mander

Narrator: Vishal Menon

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11:45:14

Language: English

Release date: 04-07-20

Publisher: Random House (Audio)

Genres: Non-Fiction, Social Science

Summary:

There was one partition of the land in 1947. Harsh Mander believes that another partition is underway in our hearts and minds.

How much of this culpability lies with ordinary people? What are the responsibilities of a secular government, of a civil society, and of a progressive majority? In Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India, human rights and peace worker Harsh Mander takes stock of whether the republic has upheld the values it set out to achieve and offers painful, unsparing insight into the contours of hate violence. Through vivid stories from his own work, Mander shows that hate speech, communal propaganda and vigilante violence are mounting a fearsome climate of dread, that targeted crime is systematically fracturing our community, and that the damage to the country's social fabric may be irreparable. At the same time, he argues that hate can indeed be fought, but only with solidarity, reconciliation and love, and when all of these are founded on fairness.

Ultimately, this meticulously researched social critique is a rallying cry for public compassion, conscience and justice, and a paean to the resilience of humanity.

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ID: 498576

Title: Dozakhnama

Author: Rabisankar Bal

Narrator: Anuj Datta

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16:38:00

Language: English

Release date: 04-07-20

Publisher: Random House (Audio)

Genres: Fiction & Literature, Classics

Summary:

Dozakhnama: Conversations in Hell is an extraordinary novel, a biography of Manto and Ghalib and a history of Indian culture rolled into one.

 

Exhumed from dust, Manto’s unpublished novel surfaces in Lucknow. Is it real or is it a fake? In this dastan, Manto and Ghalib converse, entwining their lives in shared dreams. The result is an intellectual journey that takes us into the people and events that shape us as a culture. As one writer describes it, ‘I discovered Rabisankar Bal like a torch in the darkness of the history of this subcontinent. This is the real story of two centuries of our own country.’

 

Rabisankar Bal’s audacious novel, told by reflections in a mirror and forged in the fires of hell, is both an oral tale and a shield against oblivion. An echo of distant screams. Inscribed by the devil’s quill, Dozakhnama is an outstanding performance of subterranean memory.

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ID: 348882

Title: One-hit Wonder

Author: Lisa Jewell

Narrator: Antonia Beamish

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13:13:57

Language: English

Release date: 04-02-20

Publisher: Penguin Books LTD

Genres: Romance, Fiction & Literature, Contemporary Women, Family Life

Summary:

The emotional and intriguing story of life, love and loss from the No. 1 bestseller of Then She Was Gone, brought to you by Penguin.

After her number-one single, she was never heard of again . . .

Fifteen years later, Bee Bearhorn is found dead in her flat.

Shiver in fear when Pandora opens her jar of evil torments.

Ana Willis always day-dreamed about the exotic half-sister she hadn't seen in years.

When she comes to London to sort through Bee's possessions, she uncovers a life more surprising and mysterious than even she imagined.

Along with Bee's closest friends, Ana sets out to discover exactly what happened to her half-sister, Bee Bearhorn, the one-hit wonder . . .

Narrated by AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator Antonia Beamish, Lisa Jewell's compelling novel is brought to live with poignant and captivating narration.

'A compelling story packed with intriguing characters' The Times

'Inventive and moving, with definite charms and a real sense of poignancy' Sunday Times

'Moving and intelligent' Independent

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