Sunday, July 11, 2010

An old friend appears again

There appeared on my desk the other day a slim book with the information that it was a new paperback from Penguin. It was titled Refuge and its author was Gopal Gandhi. The arrival of the book was like catching up with an old friend again.

The first time I had seen the book was in 1987 when it was titled Saranam and published by Affiliated East-West Press, Madras, one of its first fiction titles, if not the first. Then, in 1989, it came out as a hardback with the Ravi Dayal imprint and a new name, Refuge.

Ravi Dayal, when he published it, encouraged revision of the content, so it came out as ?a revised edition?. After Ravi Dayal, once head of Oxford University Press, India, and perhaps its finest Editor before striking out on his own, passed away, the few titles he had published. and he was truly choosy about what he published. were taken over by Penguin India, and, so, the Ravi Dayal version of Refuge has now come out as the paperback which arrived at my desk.

Full review here Hindu

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