Leadstart Publishing and author Sabarna Roy doing rounds of Book Reading sessions to kick off the author's latest offering 'Abyss'

Today, Leadstart Publishing had organized an experimental free-wheeling book reading session by Sabarna Roy at City Center, Salt Lake, Kolkata with book enthusiasts and young and aspiring authors from the Presidency University; Jadavpur University and St Xavier's as its audience. The session went on for an hour and a half as the author read out poems and excerpts from his stories and play one after the other to a rapt audience. The session had three interjections when the audience went into an engaging discussion with the author on his form of poetry – free narrative verse and his structure of storytelling where the reader gets to hear a story from multiple vantage points including the author very similar to a novel. The audience left satisfied with a request to Leadstart Publishing to conduct more such sessions at Kolkata, mostly in College, University and High School campuses.

About the Books:

Pentacles

Pentacles comprises one long story and four poems in free verse. The work delightfully bridges the gap between the mundane and arcane writings of today and provides an interesting, yet intellectually stimulating, treat for the discerning reader.
New Life is a long story written from the perspective of a successful adult whose mother had deserted the family for another man. The teenage angst and the scars it has left behind on the psyche of the protagonist are subtly reflected in the character. The different elements and characters of the story are beautifully interwoven to produce an intense and compelling story of an adult haunted by the trauma of being deserted by his mother. The work is interspersed with thought-provoking views on issues like love and socio-economic conditions in India.

Unshackled by the bonds of rhyme and metre, the free verses evoke the stark reality of urban life, hitting you straight in the guts. The use of everyday urban imagery adds to the appeal of the compositions. The concrete prison of urban life and the unfulfilled desire to escape to a simple life is aptly brought out in The Tower. The other poems of the collection are more biographical in nature with the protagonist being the member of the fairer sex. The poems sketch out their life story with its attendant pathos, poignancy and logic.

Frosted Glass

Frosted Glass comprises one story cycle consisting of fourteen stories and one poem cycle consisting of twenty-one poems.

The stories, set in Kolkata, bring to the fore the darkness lurking in the human psyche and bare the baser instincts. The stories, compactly written and marked by insightful dialogues that raise contemporary issues like man-woman relationships and its strains, morals and ethics, environmental degradation, class inequality, rapid and mass-scale unmindful urbanisation, are devoid of sentimentalization. The result is they remain focused and move around the central character who is named Rahul in all the stories. We encounter the events that shape, mar, guide Rahul's life and also the lives of those around him, making us question the very essence of existence. Rahul symbolises modern man; he is not just one character, but all of us rolled into one. The story cycle stands out for two reasons – its brilliant narrative and the dispassionate style with which betrayal in personal relationships and resultant loneliness has been handled.

The poems weave a maze of dreams, images, reflections and stories. They are written in a reflective and many a time in a narrative tenor within a poetic idiom. The poems are inseparable in a hidden way and are magically sequenced like various kinds of flowers in a garland or chapters of differing shades in a novel. Calcutta or Kolkata features in some of the poems like the looming backdrop of Gotham city in a Batman movie.

Abyss

Abyss is a full length play in two acts with an interval in between. It is essentially a racy crime thriller full of gritty suspense. Act one builds up slowly to result in a crescendo of conflicts between personalities and ideas finally to end with an unnatural death before the interval. Is it a suicide or a murder? Act two evolves through a series of incisive interrogations to unravel the truth, which is deeply disturbing and affecting. As the play unfolds into a very well crafted situational thriller, underneath is the debate about using land for agriculture or for industry, the ethics of a working author and the nexus of a modern state all wonderfully enmeshed into its storyline and the personal lives of its subtly etched out characters. The highpoints of the play are its central conflict between a mother and her daughter and its female sleuth – Renuka.

About the Author:

Sabarna Roy (44) is a qualified Civil Engineer from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He works in a senior management position in a manufacturing and engineering construction company. An avid reader and a film buff, Roy is widely travelled in India and lives in Kolkata with his family. He started writing during his university days, mostly English and Bengali poems. He stopped writing after he left university and took up employment. After a gap of 19 years, he started writing once again mostly to reconnect with himself.
He blogs at: http://www.storyteller10097.blogspot.com

About the Publishers:

Leadstart Publishing is a leading publishing house from India. It is both creative and progressive in its vision and publishing foci. The Leadstart Lists feature distinguished authors and writing from across the globe. Today, Leadstart Publishing has 10 brands and publishes over 200 titles a year, with imprints and products in all major book categories.
http://www.leadstartcorp.com