Amberley Publishing
Established in 2008,AmberleyPublishingis home of the ever-popular colour local history series Through Time, Amberleyis an independent publisher of books on a rich variety of history and heritage.
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Amber Books Ltd.
We are an independent illustrated non-fiction publisher based in London, UK and have been in the industry for over 30 years. We publish a growing range of titles under our own Amber Books imprint.
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A Kitchen in the Corner of the House
by Ambai
“A Kitchen in the Corner of the House collects Ambai’s most daring, original stories. Her narrators embark on journeys small and large: taking offerings across town to the goddess Mariamman or packing up four deities in a plastic box and flying them to America. These women knead mountains of chapati dough, step deep into rivers threaded with fish, and stay up late talking about books and music. Ambai’s words are sharpened knives.
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Short storiesFish in a Dwindling Lake
by Ambai
Journeys form the leitmotif of these astonishing new stories by Ambai. Some culminate in an unconventional love affair, some are extraordinary tales of loyalty and integrity; others touch upon the almost fantastic, absurd aspect of Mumbai. Yet others explore the notion of a wholesome self and its tragic absence at times. These stories are illuminated by vivid and unusual characters: from an eccentric, penurious singer-couple who adopt an ape as their son to a male prostitute who is battered by bimbos for not giving ‘full’ satisfaction. Crucially, some of the stories, like the title story, engage uninhibitedly with a woman’s relationship to her body. For Ambai, feminist par excellence, the sensual body, experienced as a natural landscape changing with age, is, at the same time, the only vehicle of life and tool for mapping the external world.
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Short storiesA Night with a Black Spider
by Ambai
Seeting the stage the Asura Mahishan’s love for the beautiful Devi, Ambai deftly combines myth and tradition with contemporary situations. In the title story, the woman who is mother, daughter, solver of all problems for her family, finds that it is only a black spider on a wall in a deserted guesthouse with whom she can share her own pain and suffering; in Burdensome Days, Bhramara enters a world of politics that turns her music into a commodity, while in A Moon to Devow, it is through her lover’s mother that Sagu learns that marriage is not a necessity for motherhood. Like the strains of the veena that play again in this masterful concert of stories, journeys too weave in and out. By train or bus or autorickshaws, each journey takes one into a different facet of human nature: the power of caste over the most basic of bodily needs like thirst; the simple generosity of a mentally afflicted child who loves the colour blue; the loneliness of dying amongst strangers, and the final journey of a veena whose owner herself had gone before it into another world. As in most of her writing, women are central to Ambai’s stories, but so too is her deep understanding of, as she puts it, ‘the pulls and tensions’ between the many different things that make up life and ultimately, create a story.
