Description: Written by the poet Thiruvalluvar, the Kamattu-p-pal is the third part of the Tirukkural – one of the most important texts in Tamil literature. The most intimate section of this great work – it is also, historically, the part that has been most heavily censored. Although hundreds of male translations of the text have been published, it has also only ever been translated by a woman once before. Tirukkural is award-winning writer Meena Kandasamy’s luminous translation of the Kamattu-p-pal.
Meena Kandasamy delves into this classic, and provides the first feminist interventionist translation into English-remaining true to the desire throbbing through the lifeblood of the text, while retaining the drama that pervades the quintessential Tamil world of exaggerated hurt, lover’s quarrels and evenings lost to longing.
With her trademark wit, lyricism and passionate insight, Meena weaves a magic spell: taking the reader on a journey through 250 kurals, organised under separate headings – ‘The Pleasure of Sex’, ‘Renouncing Shame’, ‘The Delights of Sulking’ – the result is a fresh, vital, and breath-taking translation that conveys powerful messages about female sensuality, agency, and desire. It is a revolution 2000 years in the making.
The Girl You Left Behind By Jojo Moyes
Description: France, 1916.
Sophie Lefevre must keep her family safe whilst her adored husband Edouard fights at the front. But when she is ordered to serve the German officers who descend on her hotel each evening, her home becomes a place of fierce tensions.
And from the moment the new Kommandant sets eyes on Sophie’s portrait – painted by Edouard – a dangerous obsession is born, which will lead Sophie to make a dark and terrible decision . . .
Almost a century later, and Sophie’s portrait hangs in the home of Liv Halston, a wedding gift from her young husband before he died. A chance encounter reveals the painting’s true worth, and its troubled history.
A history that is about to resurface and turn Liv’s life upside down all over again . . .
In The Girl You Left Behind two young women, separated by a century, are united in their determination to fight for what they love most – whatever the cost.
8 Things to do When You Turn 20
Description: Life in the 20s is exciting and entertaining. In this phase, one usually tastes more autonomy than ever in life. New people are introduced and new dimensions of life are opened up. You start to figure out your uniqueness and the qualities that make you special. Yet, this is also the age when everything can go wrong. You might step into well-known pitfalls and struggle for the rest of your life. You might make your life difficult by creating complex equations with other people only to find out that such people never mattered. You might not know the basics of managing your own finances and struggle with money problems for the rest of your life. You might have the potential to forge a great career, but mess it up because of wrong priorities. In cricket terminology, you can be the best batsman in the world, but if you do not know who the bowler is or what his bowling specialties are, you will struggle to play well. In the 20s, you are the batsman and life is the bowler. In order to be the best batsman, you have to know the bowler inside out. This book attempts to give you insights into life in the 20s so that you can make the best out of it. The eight chapters of this book collate the most important lessons of life in the 20s, in a concise, easy-to-read language.
Psychology of Money
Description: Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money–investing, personal finance, and business decisions–is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.
Deep Work
Description: Master one of our economy’s most rare skills and achieve groundbreaking results with this “exciting” audiobook (Daniel H. Pink) from an “exceptional” author (New York Times Book Review).
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep Work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive 21st-century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of email and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.
In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this audiobook into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules”, for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.
- Work Deeply
- Embrace Boredom
- Quit Social Media
- Drain the Shallows
A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the listener on a journey through memorable stories – from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.