Rohinton Mistry

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers - a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village - will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's eagerly awaited second novel and follows his critically acclaimed Such a Long Journey, the book that won three prestigious literary awards in 1991. Set in India in the mid-1970s, A Fine Balance is a richly textured novel which sweeps the reader up into its special world. Large in scope, the narrative focuses on four unlikely people who come together in a flat in the city soon after the government declares a "State of Internal Emergency." Through days of bleakness and hope, their lives become entwined in circumstances no one could have foreseen. There is Dina Dalal, a widow who makes a difficult living as a seamstress, determined not to remarry or rely on her brother's charity; Maneck Kohlah, a student from a hillstation near the Himalays, uprooted from home by his parents' wish to send him to college in the city; and Ishvar and his nephew, Omprakash, tailors by trade, who fleeing caste violence, leave their village in the interiour to find employment. The narrative reaches back in time to follow the stories of these four people - the lives they began with, the places they left behind. This stunning portrayal of a country undergoing change is alive with enduring images; a shopkeeper gazing out over a landscape, once-beloved, now transformed by the smoke of squatters' cooking fires; a helicopter bomarding a political rally with rose petals while the Prime Minister's son floats past in a hot-air balloon; men and women being transported in open trucks to a sterilization clinic; four people tenderly piecing together their history in the squares of a quilt. Mistry gives us an unforgettable community of characters, among them; Nusswan, a successful businessman and Dina's tyrannical yet well-meaning older brother; Rajaram, the hair-collector, who befriends the two tailors; Beggarmaster, who wheels and deals in human lives; the Potency Peddler, who hawks his wares on market day; Shanti, the young woman who inhabits Omprakash's most heated fantasies; Mr. Valmik, a proofreader who weeps copiously due to an allergy to printing ink; Farokh Kohlah, Maneck's melancholy father, marooned in the past, less and less able to accept the world as it must be. Mistry brilliantly evokes the novel's several locales, creating scenes of startling brutality as well as moments which inhabit the gentler, more intimate realm of people's lives. Written with compassion, humour and insight into the subtleties of character, the novel explores the abiding strength and fragility of the human spirit. A Fine Balance confirms Rohinton Mistry's reputation as one of the most gifted fiction writers of today.

[Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe -- [Bartleby, the scrivener]( / Herman Melville -- A whisper in the dark / Lousia May Alcott -- [The story of an hour]( / Kate Chopin -- An outpost of progress / Joseph Conrad -- The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- [Araby]( / James Joyce -- Bliss / Katherine Mansfield -- [A rose for Emily]( / William Faulkner -- A clean, well-lighted place / Ernest Hemingway -- The lamp at noon / Sinclair Ross -- Why I live at the P.O. / Eudora Welty -- My heart is broken / Mavis Gallant -- At the rendezous of victory / Nadine Gordimer -- The loons / Margaret Laurence -- Wild swans / Alice Munro -- Foghound in Avalon / Elizabeth McGrath -- The conversation of the Jews / Philip Roth -- The motor car / Austin C. Clarke -- Hazel / Carol Shields -- The boat / Alistair MacLeod -- The resplendent quetzal / Margaret Atwood -- Joseph's justice, interview with Maria Campbell / Maria Campbell -- Borders / Thomas King -- Everyday use / Alice Walker -- The naked man / Greg Hollingshead -- The prophet's hair / Salman Rushdie -- Summit with Sedna, the mother of sea beasts / Aloootook Ipellie -- Cages / Guy Vanderhaeghe -- Two kinds / Amy Tan -- Squatter / Rohinton Mistry.

Collection contains: Innocence / Sean O'Faolain -- The judgement / Franz Kafka -- Aghwee the sky monster / Kenzaburō Ōe -- The perfect game / Sergio Ramírez -- In the shadow of war / Ben Okri -- The son of Rizal -- José García Villa -- Father's last escape / Bruno Schulz -- Casa Grande / John Edgar Wideman -- Pat Hobby, putative father / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- A horseman in the sky / Ambrose Bierce -- The second generation / Stephen Crane -- Over / Rose Tremain -- A devoted son / Anita Desai -- Simple arithmetic / Virginia Moriconi -- Great Falls / Richard Ford -- Of white hairs and cricket / Rohinton Mistry -- The saw / Héctor Murena -- [Barn burning]( / William Faulkner -- The Zulu and the Zeide / Dan Jacobson -- The year of getting to know us / Ethan Canin.

Stories and excerpts of novels from India since the country attained its independence in 1947. The subjects range from religious strife, to the assault on the senses of the many people one is surrounded by.

Tales From Firozsha Baag is a collection of 11 short stories by Rohinton Mistry about the residents of Firozsha Baag, a Parsi-dominated apartment complex in Mumbai. Mistry's first book, it was published by Penguin Canada in 1987.

Stories based on different aspects of human life.

Fiction. My kinsman, Major Molineux / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Purloined Letter]( / Edgar Allan Poe [Bartleby, the scrivener]( / Herman Melville [The story of an hour]( / Kate Chopin Heartache / Anton Chekhov The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman The marine excursion of the Knights of Pythias / Stephen Leacock The bride comes to yellow sky / Stephen Crane [Araby]( / James Joyce The rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence The garden party / Katherine Mansfield Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( / William Faulkner The demon lover / Elizabeth Bowen A clean, well-lighted place / Ernest Hemingway A cap for Steve / Morley Callaghan The painted door / Sinclair Ross Antigone / Sheila Watson Why I live at the P.O. / Eudora Welty The swimmer / John Cheever The magic barrel / Bernard Malamud A sunrise on the veld / Doris Lessing The ice wagon going down the street / Mavis Gallant Everything that rises must converge / Flannery O'Connor A bird in the house / Margaret Laurence Lost in the funhouse / John Barth Family furnishings / Alice Munro The boat / Alistair MacLeod The lady from Lucknow / Bharati Mukherjee Borders / Thomas King The collectors / Rohinton Mistry Fleur / Louise Erdrich Poetry. The miller's prologue and tale / Geoffrey Chaucer Shall I compare there ... ; When, in disgrace ... ; No more be grieved ... ; Not marble nor the gilded monuments ; Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea ; that time of year though mayst in me behold ; My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun / William Shakespeare The good morrow ; The sun rising ; The canoniztion; The relic ; Death, be not proud ; Batter my heart / John Donne Delight in disorder ; Upon Julia's clothes ; To the virgins, to make much of time / Robert Herrick On Shakespeare ; how soon hath time ; Lycidas ; When I consider how my light is spent / John Milton To his coy mistress ; The garden ; The fair singer ; The coronet / Andrew Marvell Eloisa to Abelard ; Epistle IV: to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlingon / Alexander Pope The lamb ; The clod and the pebble ; The chimney-sweeper ; The sick rose ; The tyger ; London ; Auguries of innocence / William Blake I wandered lonely as a cloud ; Ode: intimations of immortality ; Composed upon Westminster Bridge ; The world is too much with us ; Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey / William Wordsworth Ode to a nightingale ; Ode on a Grecian urn ; Ode to autumn ; La belle dames sans merci ; Bright star ; On the sonnet / John Keats The lady of Shalott ; Ulysses ; Tears, idle tears ; Dark house, by which once more I stand ; A happy lover who has come ; Now fades the last long streak of snow / Alfred, Lord Tennyson-- Solioquy of the Spanish cloister ; my last duchess ; The bishop orders his tomb ; Porphyria's lover / Robert Browning Crossing Brooklyn Ferry ; I hear America singing ; A sight in camp in the daybreak grey and dim ; The ox-tamer ; The dalliance of the eagles / Walt Whitman Success is counted sweetest ; I'm 'wife' I've finished that ; The heart asks pleasure first ; Because I could not stop for death ; What is 'Paradise' ; I never hear the word ; I heard a fly buzz / Emily Dickinson Hap ; The darkling thrush ; The convergence of the twain ; The oxen ; During wind and rain ; In time of 'The breaking of nations' / Thomas Hardy God's grandeur ; The windhover ; Pied beauty ; Spring and fall: to a young child ; Though art indeed just, Lord / Gerard Manley Hopkins The death of Tennyson ; The city of the end of things ; Winter-solitude ; At the long sault: May 1660 / Archibald Lampman The lake isle of Innisfree ; The wild swans at Coole ; The second coming ; Leda and the swan ; Among school children ; Sailing to Byzantium ; After long silence ; The circus animal's desertion / William Butler Yeats Mending wall ; After apple-picking ; Birches ; Design ; Stopping by woods on a snowy evening ; Provide, provied / Robert Frost Sunday morning ; Anecdote of the jar ; Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird ; The snow man ; A high-toned old Christian woman ; Of modern poetry / Wallace Stevens The shark ; One hour of life ; Erosion; Silences; The deed / E.J. Pratt The widow's lament in springtime ; Spring and all ; The red wheelbarrow ; Flowers by the sea ; The last words of my English grandmother ; The yachts ; Landscape with the fall of Icarus / William Carlos Williams The fish ; Nevertheless ; A Jellyfish / Marianne Moore The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock ; The hollow men ; Journey of the Magi ; Marina / T.S. Eliot Buffalo Bill's ; Spring is like a perhaps hand ; somewhere i have never travelled ; my father moved through dooms of love ; pity this busy monster / e. e. cummings Who's who ; As I walked out one evening ; Lullaby ; Musee des beaux arts ; In memory of W.B. Yeats ; The unknown citizen / W.H. Auden Soiree of Velvel Kleinburger ; The rocking chair ; Portrait of the poet as landscape / A.M. Klein The map ; First death in Nova Scotia ; In the waiting room ; One art / Elizabeth Bishop The cold green element ; Berry picking ; Whatever else poetry is freedom ; Keine Lazarovitch 1870-1959 / Irving Layton The force that through the green fuse drives the flower ; A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London ; Do not go gentle into that good night ; Fern Hill / Dylan Thomas The stenographers ; Photos of a salt mine ; Arras ; The new bicycle ; Deaf-mute in the pear tree / P.K. Page 'To speak of woe that is in marriage' ; Skunk hour ; Water; For the union dead / Robert Lowell Snow ; New Year's poem ; The swimmer's moment ; Butterfly bones; or sonnet against sonnets ; In a season of unemployment ; We the poor who are always with us / Margaret Avison The poet's mother ; Hornbook #43 ; Hornbook #45 / Robert Kroetsch Marvell's garden ; Lament ; To friends who have also considered suicide ; The days of the Unicorns / Phyllis Webb The afterwake ; Moving in winter ; Novella ; Night-pieces: for a child ; Rape / Adrienne Rich Sheep in fog ; Daddy ; Kindness ; Edge ; Words / Sylvia Plath At the tourist centre in Boston ; Death of a young son by drowning ; Variations on the word Love ; Variation on the word Sleep ; Interlunar ; Morning in the burned house / Margaret Atwood make it new ; attractive ; subversion in tokyo ; on the sublime / Roy Miki Bearhug ; Letters & other worlds ; Elizabeth ; The cinnamon peeler / Michael Ondaatje Essay on Adam ; The stonecutter's horses / Leda and the swan / Robert Bringhurst Island vanish ; From thirsty / Dionne Brand Look homeward, exile ; Bees' wings ; Blank sonnet ; Le tombeau de bishop ; Paris annapolis ; Burning poems / George Elliott Clarke Drama. Oedipus Rex / Sophocles King Lear / William Shakespeare The school for scandal / Robert Brinsley Sheridan Hedda Gabler / Henrik Ibsen The importance of being Earnest / Oscar Wilde [Pygmalion]( / George Bernard Shaw Krapp's last tape / Samuel Beckett The price / Arthur Miller The zoo story / Edward Albee Doc / Sharon Pollock For the pleasure of seeing her again / Michel Tremblay The Rez sisters / Tomson Highway