Gurdial Singh : A Reader is a ‘one-stop shop’ that showcases the life, times and works of one of the most significant living novelists in Punjabi today. A prominent trendsetter in Punjabi fiction, Gurdial Singh has put the dispossessed and the marginalized at the centre of his fictionscape. He belongs to that rare breed of Indian writers who continue to show critical engagement with contemporary social reality, and invariably portray this reality with a touch of authenticity, ideological commitment and passionate intensity. His writing betrays a definite penchant for critical realism, and carries an imprint, not necessarily the burden, of the classical tradition of writing.