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Sakina's Kiss
Vivek Shanbhag
Sakina's Kiss is a novel by the Indian writer Vivek Shanbhag, written in Kannada and translated into English by Srinath Perur. It is narrated by Venkat, a middle-class man in Bengaluru whose ordered life is upended when two strangers come looking for his daughter and she later goes missing, a turn that pulls him back to a long-buried family secret. It is Shanbhag's second novel to appear in English, after Ghachar Ghochar, and was again translated by Perur. The English translation was published in India in 2023 and in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2025. It was shortlisted for the 2026 James Tait Black Prize for fiction.
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Vivek’s Notes
Eight years after the groundbreaking Ghachar Ghochar, translated by the equally inimitable Srinath Perur. Our narrator Venkat is stuck in a quagmire of mediocrity, a mid-level executive with tepid relationships with his wife and daughter. Except in a Taken-like spin, his daughter disappears, and he has to go up against a world of men to find her.
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