‘When elderly Mr Secondhand surprises everyone in St Jerome’s Colony, Dona Paula, by getting a wife, everyone suspects the wife is secondhand too. But Mr Secondhand has more surprises up his sleeve. Another eponymous hero, Lancelot Gomes, “at least fifty plus”, marries again and again. The nameless narrator of “Taverna”, seeing which way the wind is blowing, changes his caju-fuelled tune. Shetty’s stories can turn darker or lighter, and sometimes both at the same time, when all that his characters seem to be doing is exchanging pleasantries. He writes fiction like few others because the magic of his stories is driven as much by what he hears as by what he sees around him.’
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
‘Manohar Shetty’s uniquely picaresque tales are imbued with wry wit and a youthful freshness of language. They succeed in showing us that the ordinariness of life is itself a gift.’
Kavery Nambisan
‘Reading Manohar Shetty is like having a bun-and-maska tea break. These stories are fresh, roundly satisfying, and unfailingly enjoyable. Set mostly in the imaginary St Jerome’s Colony in Dona Paula, Shetty’s unforgettable characters are glowingly Goan, but their spirit is universal. We recognize them afterwards in a cousin, an aunt, an uncle, or a friend. Shetty handles even the wickedest of his colourful people with an ironic warmth. He is the Mario Miranda of Goan literature.’
C.P. Surendran
Mr Secondhand and Other Stories
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