26 February, 2015

#BookSpotlight :: A Mirrored Life by Rabosankar Bal

My learned readers, you know that there are stories even before there are stories, but some stories are bound by fate.

On his way from Tangiers to China, the medieval Moorish traveller Ibn Battuta arrives in Konya, Turkey where the legendary dervish Rumi had lived, danced and died. More than half a century may have passed since his death, but his poetry remains alive, inscribed in every stone and tree and pathway. 

Rumi’s followers entrust Ibn Battuta with a manuscript of his life stories to spread word of the mystic on his travels. As Battuta reads and recites these tales, his listeners discover their own lives reflected in these stories—fate has bound them, and perhaps you, to Rumi. 

A Mirrored Life reaffirms the magical powers of storytelling, making us find Rumi in each of our hearts. Told through an interweaving of stories, legends and anecdotes, this narration lifts the veil off Rumi’s journey from scholar to mystic, his relationship with Shams, and his poetry, eventually bringing the reader face to face with the Rumi in their own hearts.


‘[Reading Bal is] like sitting and listening to your grandfather tell war stories’—Asian Review of Books

Author bio
Rabisankar Bal is a Bangla novelist and short-story writer, and has published over fifteen novels, five short-story collections, one volume of poetry and one volume of literary essays. Born in 1962, he has been writing for thirty years. His novel Dozakhnama, acclaimed by the late doyen of Bengali literature Sunil Gangopadhyay as the finest novel of 2010, won the West Bengal government’s Bankimchandra Smriti Puraskar. 

Translator bio
Arunava Sinha translates contemporary and classic Bengali fiction into English. He has seventeen published translations to his name. 
He translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right, he has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) in the UK for his translation of Chowringhee. 
Arunava's translation blog: http://arunavasinha.in/ 
Twitter: @arunava

Published by Random House India;
January 2015;
192 Pages; 
Paperback Rs. 399

1 Paperback Copy of the Book is up for grabs at my 3 year Blogiversary Celebration Giveaway!

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