Sakina's Kiss

Shanbhag's debut here, Ghachar Ghochar, was one of the first novels written in Kannada, a language spoken by tens of millions in southwestern India, to be translated into English. His second, also translated by Perur, carries off the difficult feat of telling a dramatic story of personal and political turmoil from the perspective of a complacent, almost clueless, almost always cowardly main character, Venkat, who has tried to piece together an urban, bourgeois life with the advice from his ashamedly beloved self-help books. Through his timid eyes, and the often-offscreen rebellions of his young-adult daughter, you get glimpses of what is required to challenge betrayal and injustice, and what is required to pretend they don't exist.