New Delhi: A new book titled ‘Onam in a Nightie – Stories from a Kerala Quarantine’ gives a glimpse of the true character of Kerala through its ordinary characters. It takes you to a place that you wish stays the way it is forever, in stories of hope and resilience from a midway Kerala town.
The book, written by Anjana Menon and published by HarperCollins India, will be released on 27 January on SoftCover, ThePrint’s venture to launch select non-fiction books.
In this alternatively heart-warming and hilarious book, the fictional town of Malgudi meets reality in the search for joy and belonging. It tells the stories of ordinary people from India’s tropical paradise.
“When life slows down, everything comes under a magnifying glass and we get time to observe the little coincidences, the small gestures here and there, the stray remarks. It’s almost as though they string you along to reveal how the ordinary stuff is extraordinary, and that’s more uplifting than we take it to be. This book is set in Kerala, but it is also about what makes us human,” says the author.
“This book feels like the reader is invited to just sit and watch people going about life… It is a relief and a pleasure to find a book that does not have a grand theme to tell a grand lie, which instead, in its respect for the ordinary, reveals the true character of a state, a second world trapped in a third world,” award winning author Manu Joseph writes about the book.
Suchismita Ukil, senior editor at HarperCollins, says the book will “compel you to pace through it for its wit and sharp writing, yet one which will inspire you to slow down and look up – and find magic in the mundane”.
Anjana Menon, a literature student, began her career as a journalist with Bloomberg News and worked in Southeast Asia and Europe. She returned to India as one of the founder-editors of the business newspaper Mint and then ran a television newsroom before setting up her own content strategy consultancy. She is a co-author of ‘What’s Your Story? The Essential Business Storytelling Handbook’ published by Penguin Random House. ‘Onam in a Nightie’ is her debut creative non-fiction book.
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