Here is a review sourced from mouthshut.com site:

Jim Corbett’s ’’Man Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag’’ has already topped the charts as one of the most celebrated animal stories. The villain of this piece is a cunning leopard
which, according to Corbett himself, was ’one of the most publicized animals’ that has ever lived. Jim Corbett had shot two man-eating leopards in Kumaon. One was the Panar man-eater which operated in an extremely remote area of Kumaon. However the leopard of Rudraprayag hunted in an area through which thousands of good Hindu pilgrims used to make their journey each year to the holy shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath.

The book starts off with a description of the pilgrim route, starting at Hardwar to Rishikesh, then through the Laxman Jhula, right up the mountains. It was in this region that the leopard of our story set up its hunting grounds but the only problem was it preyed on humans. The terror that this animal created, is so vividly brought out that the reader is held right on to the edge of his seat with a chill down his spine ! One of the exploits of this leopard as given in the book is as follows. At dusk a man and his friend were sitting inside a hut in darkness chatting with each other and smoking hookah. One of them accidentally dropped the hookah. Shouting at his friend that he would set the hut ablaze, the man stooped to pick up the ash and as he did so, the door of the hut which was open, came to his view and through it, silhouetted against the rising moon, he saw the leopard carrying away his friend. The man claimed not to have heard as much as the intake of a breath during the entire procedure.Many such spine-chilling instances of the leopard’s notoriety are presented in the book.

Corbett recounts one of his night adventures with this leopard as his night of terror. The reader is awed along with Corbett, at the degree of cunningness an animal can achieve as it thwarts almost all efforts to bag it but one. The description that Corbett provides along the details of each and every sound in the jungle and every clue in the forest that he uses to track the leopard is fascinating.

The elements that set apart this story from other Corbett stories about man-eaters are the multiple night vigils for shooting the leopard. Sometimes the leopard escaped by a hair, sometimes Corbett considered himself lucky to come out of it in a single piece. This dual game goes on throughout the story and completely absorbs the reader,until the game is won in favor of Corbett.

There’s one word of caution that I would like to present to the prospective readers and also to those who have already read this book. This leopard was a particular animal and thus no conclusions should be drawn from it about leopards in general. Leopards are often wrongfully branded as ’scavengers’, ’vermins’, ’shrewd’ and ’cunning’. But in truth, the leopard is the most beautiful of all animals to be found in the Indian jungle,shy and agile in its own unique way. It is one of the most beautiful creations of God and we should all vow for the conservation and protection of the Indian Leopard.

I guess I have read all of Jim Corbett's books abt 3-4 times each..... I love his choice of words and the construction of his sentences. In addition the subject of his stories is itself very gripping!!

The Witch of Potorbello by Paulo Coelho

Multimillion-seller Coelho (The Devil and Miss Prym, etc.) returns with another uncanny fusion of philosophy, religious miracle and moral parable. The Portobello of the title is London's Portobello Road, where Sherine Khalil, aka Athena, finds the worship meeting she's leading—where she becomes an omniscient goddess named Hagia Sophia—disrupted by a Protestant protest. Framed as a set of interviews conducted with those who knew Athena, who is dead as the book opens, the story recounts her birth in Transylvania to a Gypsy mother, her adoption by wealthy Lebanese Christians; her short, early marriage to a man she meets at a London college (one of the interviewees); her son Viorel's birth; and her stint selling real estate in Dubai. Back in London in the book's second half, Athena learns to harness the powers that have been present but inchoate within her, and the story picks up as she acquires a "teacher" (Deidre O'Neill, aka Edda, another interviewee), then disciples (also interviewed), and speeds toward a spectacular end. Coelho veers between his signature criticism of modern life and the hydra-headed alternative that Athena taps into. Athena's earliest years don't end up having much plot, but the second half's intrigue sustains the book

"Life of Pi" -Yann Martel.

How is it?

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie a latest novel from the Author. It starts from India and travels to Italy on Akbar's period.

A reveiw sourced from Net:

"The Enchantress of Florence. When its story opens, a handsome young Florentine with flowing golden hair is riding towards Fatehpur Sikri, the newly built victory capital of the emperor Akbar. He bears with him a dramatic secret only to be disclosed to the Mogul ruler: despite his youth and European origins, he is, he claims, the emperor's uncle. Can this be true? And, if so, how?

Long before the answers to these riddles are provided in the book's last pages, other questions are likely to have presented themselves rather more pressingly to any reader proceeding through this novel's farrago of curses, omens, potions, prophecies, aphrodisiac unguents, evil queens, sorceresses, irresistible beauties, love-struck despots, wise whores, jealous wives, wicked aunts, albino giants, phantoms, “potato witches”, magic mirrors, miraculous perfumes and telepathic bathwater. Prominent among these questions is why any author wishing to be taken seriously would put his name to such stuff.

The probable explanation is that Rushdie sees himself as applying the fabulous tale-telling techniques of The Thousand and One Nights to an epic of interaction between Renaissance Florence and India at the height of the Mogul supremacy."