COOL CUT
Sharad Paul – Picador - $24.99

This is the story of three friends and begins with the author visiting a hair-dressing salon in Madras, (Cool Cut), where he learns and then narrates the story of those three friends who grew up flying kites on the river bank in their home town.
In the course of the story, which frequently employs quite poetic language, the three friends each have a very different experience with “cutting” – Kumar as a hairdresser, Raman when he is castrated by eunuchs and Lakshmi at a Carmelite Convent cut off from family. Unusual, and a little bloodthirsty at times the book nevertheless is something of a love story, both love of language (Tamil) and love between individuals and for a debut novel is quite impressive.

Even more impressive is the author himself. He is a surgeon and GP, bookseller, school helper and family man, and now an author too.
He owns the BACI bookshop and café in Newmarket, Auckland which was featured in Time magazine recently which I wrote about on the blog last month.
But last weekend Suzanne McFadden writing in the NZ Herald wrote a major story about him which if you missed it is well worth reading. Link below.


Here is her opening:


"Father says all that a kite needs to fly is a gust of a dream. Kites have wings, men don't. Men need dreams to reach beyond roofs, trees and to dance among the clouds. Kites need men to control them to keep their dreams sane."
- from Cool Cut, a novel by Sharad P. Paul

Dr Sharad Paul has high-flying dreams. Dreams so big, most of us comparatively lesser mortals would let go with the first bluster of an ill-wind, or just never get off the ground.
Not all of his dreams have had wings. He showed an exceptional talent for physics at school, but his parents did not want to send their young son to an American college at 15. Instead, he followed his family into medicine, but discovered he needed to pursue other dreams as well to keep himself "sane".
Sitting in the Baci Lounge, a bookstore-cafe he created - it's an intimate, warm red haven above the late afternoon chill and hustle of Broadway, Newmarket - Paul pulls his indispensable palm pilot from his trouser pocket and prompts his calendar, though he knows the routine by heart.

Read the full piece from the NZ Herald online. Photo by Glenn Jeffrey for the NZ Herald.