The people of San Felice, still dizzy from Count Jeorge de la Bolla’s party, wake up to the news that their host had been murdered.

This is the company that published Jane Austen, Chares Darwin, Lord Byron and Flaubert, says Anurima Roy, publicity manager at Hachette India.

Aditya Sudarshan is 26 years and two novels old. He entered the league of young Indian writers in 2007 when his first book A Nice Quiet Holiday was published.

When was the last time you heard the story of the jinni who came out of a wonderful lamp? Bartimaeus is that kind of demon. He runs errands for his masters, yet keeps an eye for ways to outwit him; is punished repeatedly for his audacious behaviour and finds himself time and again in the midst of trouble.

For most readers in India, Turkey is synonymous with Orhan Pamuk which makes writers like Elif Shafak somewhat of a delayed discovery.

“Sometimes you need that one knock in life to stir up new ideas in your mind,” and that is what led to “Amaryllis”, says Sanjana Roy Choudhury, head of publishing.

In history, Mumtaz Mahal is an indelible name associated with the queen for whom the Taj Mahal was built. Few, however, know the woman she was, Arjumand Bano, mother of 14 children.

The Hypercomputer named Deep Thought in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes up with an answer to “The Ultimate Question Of Life” after nine years of calculations. The answer is 42.

Unpublished auth-ors are a curious lot. Desperate, helpless and often the butt of all jokes. They never know what went wrong with their work. Most publishers respond, if at all, with one-liners rejecting the manuscript for not being upto the required brief. So as few get published, many hundreds sulk at their defeat. While big publishing

Monkeys are curious animals. Stories about their antics amused me as a child. But I never had a chance to see one in its “element”, until recently.