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.

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.

THE TUMULT over its poor performance in the Lok Sabha polls has left the BJP in tatters. In retrospection, where a collective responsibility for the debacle would have saved the day for the party, the search for scapegoats has resulted in a clash of egos. This is primarily a result of individuals overgrowing the party.

Call it ‘Cabo Raj Niwas’, ‘Palacio Do Cabo’ or ‘Raj Bhavan’, the 86-acre property in Dona Paula is the subject of a recently-released book simply called ‘The Raj Bhavan Goa’. Reproduced below is an excerpt from the introduction to the informative book published by the Department of Information and Publicity.