Anita Nair
Anita Nair is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of the novels The Better Man, Ladies Coupé, Mistress, Lessons in Forgetting, Idris: Keeper of the Light and Alphabet Soup for Lovers. She has also authored a crime series featuring Inspector Gowda.
New Release
Why I Killed My Husband & Other Such Stories
Westland
A powerful collection of stories spanning a tumultuous decade in India’s recent social and political history.
Each of the six stories in this arresting volume cleverly captures the interplay between the personal and the political in the last decade while exploring the everyday existence of Indians across different social strata.
A landowner contemptuous of political activism finds it taking root in his own home. A couple’s holiday takes a surprising turn when they initiate a role-playing game. In a traditional akhada in northern India, caste drives the plot as much as the characters’ will. A woman’s marriage quickly morphs into an endless series of humiliations—until she decides to do something about it.
Set in different parts of the country:: a small town in Karnataka, a temple town and a village across the border in Kerala, cosmopolitan Chennai and Bengaluru, and a farm near Hathras in Uttar Pradesh. Exploring a range of themes, from gender violence to pandemic lockdowns and cyber fraud, while fusing incisive social commentary with deeply evocative emotional truths. In doing so, the stories will take the reader on a transformative journey, both disturbing and memorable.
Why I Killed My husband is a collection of state-of-the-nation stories that will take the reader on a transformative journey, both disturbing and memorable.
Crime Series by Anita Nair
Cut Like Wound
It is the first night of Ramadan. At Shivaji Nagar in the heart of Bangalore, a young male prostitute is killed and burnt alive. It would have stayed as yet another unsolved murder, but for Inspector Borei Gowda, the investigating officer. As bodies begin to pile up one after the other, and it becomes clear that a serial killer is on the prowl, Gowda recognizes a pattern in the killings which no one else does. Even as he negotiates serious mid-life blues, problems with his wife and son, an affair with an ex-girlfriend, and official apathy and ridicule, the killer moves in for the next victim…
Chain of Custody
How is twelve-year-old Nandita’s disappearance connected to the murder of a well-known lawyer? What services has college student Rekha been persuaded to perform by her ‘boyfriend’? Who is the mysterious crime lord lurking just out of sight? And who, just who, is Krishna?It begins as a search for a missing girl, but the case takes a more sinister turn when Inspector Gowda finds himself embroiled in Bangalore’s child-trafficking racket.
Hot Stage
When 82 years old Professor Mudgood is found dead in his home in Bangalore by his daughter, it is considered a natural death. But Borei Gowda, now Assistant Commissioner of Police in the force, isn’t so certain. It therefore comes as no surprise to him when the preliminary investigations reveal the death to be a homicide. All evidence points to a political murder since the professor was a well-known rationalist and a fervent critic of right-wing forces in India. But the more Gowda delves into the case, the more convinced he is that this isn’t an assassination.
Reviews
What People are Saying about this series
“A story that explores the mind of a killer”
“Nair introduces us to a police detective who is commonplace, human, a man one can relate to. Inspector Gowda is 49, going to seed, and often at odds with those around him. Nair weaves a fast paced, engrossing tale of suspense as Gowda and Santosh investigate. More corpses turn up, as do clues, sometimes serendipitous….Even though there is plenty of police procedure (meticulously researched, it appears), this is not an old-fashioned whodunit. And therein lies the strength of Cut Like Wound. It is not just a story of another smart cop on the trail of another serial killer. It is more a story that explores the mind of a killer, even tempts the reader to sympathise. All the time, without letting go of the fact that Gowda is the true protagonist.”
India Today
“Anita seeks to push her literary boundaries”
“In Cut Like Wound, Nair retains that same earthiness, in a dramatically different genre. By the author’s own admission, she seeks to push her literary boundaries and that is evident in this new book and its unexpected ‘hero’ — one very likely to be a recurrent character in a future series. The unglamorously named Inspector Borei Gowda literally pops out of the pages at you, and by the finish, is so lifelike that you have his entire appearance and personality mentally mapped out…..The story is an honest yet uncomfortably raw exposé of the underbelly of contemporary Indian life. The title of the book definitely plays on these deep undercuts, wounds that fester till they eat into the very core of our charmed existence.”
Khajeej Times
“All-too-human cop hero”
“Ian Rankin names four favourite novels for 2016 in the Guardian (Nov 26), includes Chain of Custody by Anita Nair: ‘concerns child slavery in Bangalore and is both brutal and sympathetic, with an all-too-human (and not entirely likable) cop hero.’”
The Guardian
“Ten best crime novels of 2016”
“List of ten best crime novels of 2016 (Nov.26) includes Chain of Custody: ‘Bangalore is India’s Silicon Valley, the rich face of Indian success in modern technology and its commercial accompaniments. Such wealth attracts crime. Inspector Borei Gowda is an admirable three-dimensional creation, quick tempered and emotional. The search for a missing 13-year-old girl develops into the more serious discovery that Bangalore has become a hub for the sex-trafficking of young girls. It is Anita Nair’s home town and it shows, in the lively portrait of a city in uncertain transition and in the passion with which she endows Gowda in his war against evil. “
Marcel Berlins
Don’t Miss
News And Events
Anitharam in the Malayala Manorama
Read Anita Nair’s fortnightly column Anitharam in the Malayala Manorama
Ladies Coupe Sinhalese
Ladies Coupe now in SinhaleseStorytel
Devi Award
Anita Nair receives The Devi Award instituted by the New Indian Express GroupStorytel