Let me tell you about Quinta, By Savia Viegas, Penguin Books, PP 254, Rs 299.

When the Curtains Rise… By Andre Rafael Fernandes, Tiatr Academy of Goa and Goa, 1556, Pp 201, Rs 195.

Beautiful Thing, By Sonia Faleiro, Hamish Hamilton, pp 214, Rs 450.

I’VE OFTEN wondered why Buddhism didn’t take root in the fertile spiritual soil of India, seeing how Ashoka, the great Mauryan emperor who embraced Buddhism after witnessing the senseless slaughter during the Kalinga war, had tried to propagate the faith throughout his kingdom.

ON FEBRUARY 14, India’s queen of Fado, Sonia Shirsat, will present Mundo Fado II, a concert of traditional and contemporary Fado at 7.30 pm at Kala Academy. She will be accompanied by Portuguese musicians Flavio Texeira Cardoso on the Portuguese guitar and Pedro Miguel Soares on classical guitar, who have been specially flown down from Lisbon by Fundação Oriente for this concert, as well as Mayuresh Vasta, MArwino Antonio Da Costa and Milind Chari.

THE problem is one is not used to seeing Konkani films! It’s a mind set which ought to change and change quickly for this is a language which needs a lot of making up (it has been so badly treated by history!)…personally, as a bhaile I think the more Konkani films I see, the more my miserable knowledge of Konkani will improve.

The Crimson Throne by SUDHIR KAKAR is a historical novel based on the accounts of two European travellers Niccolao Manucci and Francois Bernier of the last days of the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Of special interest to Goans is the fact that Niccolao Manucci spent a year in Goa before he became part of the Emperor’s Court. Reproduced below is Manucci’s account of his arrival in Goa.

ARE FIRST novels set in Goa destined to be romantic? Let me see now. Sorrowing Lies My Land by Lambert Mascarenhas, 95, first published in 1955, carries a romantic aura of freedom from colonial rule. Tivolem by Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, 84, published in 1998, has a love story blossoming in a place called Tivolem, a fictitious place in Goa situated in Porvorim.

In Pamuk’s novel, a 30-year-old, wealthy Turkish playboy named Kemal begins an affair with his distant cousin Fusun, 18, a shop girl who is poor but beautiful. He does this despite the fact that he’s engaged to a woman educated in Paris, of his own social class, and westernised enough to sleep with him before marriage.

A panoramic cavalcade of a novel, The Children’s Book spans a quarter of a century from 1895 to the aftermath of the first world war, crisscrosses Britain and Europe, follows the intersecting fortunes of four families and swarms with vivid subsidiary characters, from real-life figures such as Oscar Wilde, Auguste Rodin and Marie Stopes to an invented cast of late-Victorian and Edwardian writers, artists, anarchists, City financiers, Fabian progressives, potters, puppeteers, dons, debutantes, New Women, suffragettes, soldiers, philanthropists and philanderers.