New Books in Town

The Templar Salvation
Raymond Khoury
The Templar Salvation is the sequel to
Khoury’s The Last Templar. The action packed
story is told in two parallel threads: The first
narrative is set in 1203 in Constantinople
where a group of the Knights Templar infil
trate the imperial library and escape with
valuable artefacts. But they are killed before
they can learn the secrets the artefacts hold
The second thread is set in present day Vati
can City. Tess Chaykin, archaeologist and
partner to FBI agent Sean Reilly has been kid
napped. To save her, Sean must infiltrate the
Vatican’s Secret Archives of the Inquisition
that holds the explosive secret to the Tem
plars’ extermination
Table For Four
K Srilata
Maya, Sandra and Derek live in Uncle Prithvi’s
apartment in Santa Cruz. They’ve been house
mates for three years through graduate stud
ies. With the course over, and the three all set
to leave the apartment the next day, Maya
Sandra and Uncle Prithvi sit down at the
table, waiting for Derek to return. They start
swapping life stories. And because it is their
last night together, they reveal their deepest
fears: Sandra talks about growing up in an or
phanage; Uncle Prithvi regrets abandoning his
daughter for a life in the US, and Maya, who
has a secret crush on Derek, can’t bring her
self to talk at all
The Mind’s Eye
Oliver Sacks
Neurologist Oliver Sacks narrates stories o
people he’s met in his practice: a patient who
can write but can’t read, one who has lost the
power of speech after a stroke but can stil
communicate, one who viewed the world as
two-dimensional until her 50s, etc. And then
there’s the case of Oliver Sacks himself. Sacks
has face blindness — he can’t recognise
faces, a consequence of brain surgery. One
time, he was grooming his beard in a restau
rant window only to realise later that the per
son on the other side was a grey bearded
man. He tries to explain how the brain works
and what happens when this is interrupted
Tender Hooks
Moni Mohsin
Set in Pakistan high society, this is the story
of a girl named Butterfly (from The Diary Of A
Social Butterfly). The story is told through
Butterfly’s diary entries. Her aunt — Aunty
Pushy — has asked Butterfly to find a suitable
bride for her recently divorced son Jonkers
Butterfly sets about scheming her way
through social events, kitty parties, weddings
and the like to find her cousin Jonkers the
wife his mother wants him to have: a rich, fair
beautiful, “family type”. But even while she’s
on the hunt for a sister-in-law, her cousin has
ideas of his own of what to look for in a wife