YEAR in books

GJV Prasad

I have been part of the jury of the Sushila Devi Award for fiction by women authors for half a decade and thus the first titles that spring to mind when I draw up a list of books I read and liked this year are by women — Janice Pariat’s brilliant genre-bending ‘Everything the Light Touches’, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s ‘Independence’ (her best so far), Aanchal Malhotra’s ‘The Book of Everlasting Things’ (proves she is a writer to look out for), Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s ‘The Secret of More’ (a Bombay/Mumbai novel), Anupama Mohan’s ‘Where Mayflies Live Forever’ (a thriller, a murder mystery, or a devastating critique of society?), Anupama Raju’s ‘C: A Novel’ (polished writing), Annie Zaidi’s ‘City of Incident: A Novel in Twelve Parts’ (Mumbai in 12 stories), Koral Dasgupta’s ‘Draupadi’ (part of her ‘Sati’ series — interesting retelling of the stories of the pancha kanyas), and Harini Nagendra’s ‘The Bangalore Detectives Club’, which is set in the colonial era. Since these novels were necessarily published in 2022, let me move to the novels published in 2023.

First, the big guns. This year saw the publication of Salman Rushdie’s ‘Victory City’. It is a great read and definitely one of my favourite reads of the year. It has everything you expect from Rushdie, including a reading of the present through looking at the past. Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant non-fictional account ‘Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories’ shows why the anthropologist is such a wonderful writer.

We get history wedded with Ghosh’s concern about the environment. And Manju Kapur’s ‘The Gallery’ is another fine novel by one of our leading writers. The next book, the wrist-breaking ‘The Running Grave’ by Robert Galbraith (I wish she wrote in instalments) is ‘immensely’ readable.

Our desi bestseller Anuja Chauhan’s ‘The Fast and the Dead’ is a welcome addition to her oeuvre and threatens to make ACP Bhavani Singh a household figure. If you haven’t read this or the earlier ‘Club You to Death’, you don’t know what you have been missing.

While on detective fiction, I read some cracking novels this year. Richard Osman’s ‘Thursday Murder Club’ series is to die for! The latest, ‘The Last Devil to Die’, makes you wish for more, and hopefully, he will oblige. Donna Leon’s ‘Brunetti’ series is going strong and this year’s ‘So Shall You Reap’ does not disappoint. Her Venice is a changing city and it is best to read the books chronologically. By the way, if you stopped reading Jeffrey Archer a while ago because he was writing badly, you should pick up his ‘Traitors Gate’. He is back in form! And if you haven’t read the ‘Perveen Mistry’ series by Sujatha Massey, you have to begin now. The latest, ‘The Mistress of Bhatia House’, has cemented Perveen Mistry’s and Massey’s place on my shelf!

The next book I recommend is Keigo Higashino’s ‘A Death in Tokyo’ (a Kaga mystery). To jog your memory, his novel ‘The Devotion of Suspect X’ has proved inspirational to many. I am really fond of murder mysteries, and the book that surprised me this year was also very funny! It is ‘Grave Expectations’ by Alice Bell, a book I bought on a whim that turned out to be such an entertainer. And while we are on this genre, how can one leave out Kalpana Swaminathan and her Lalli mysteries? The latest is ‘The Kala Ghoda Affair’. Anuradha Kumar’s ‘The Kidnapping of Mark Twain’ is another Bombay novel, another well-written mystery.

Kalpana Swaminathan also writes in collaboration with Ishrat Syed, under the pseudonym Kalpish Ratna. Their latest offering ‘Bahadur Shah of Gujarat: A King in Search of a Kingdom’ is about the other Bahadur Shah (not the Mughal) and, need I say, it is a must-read, a book very intriguingly structured. I must also mention Malathi Ramachandran’s ‘Begum Hazrat Mahal: Warrior Queen of Awadh’, as also Anindyo Roy’s ‘The Viceroy’s Artist’, both works of fiction based on interesting historical figures.

To move away from mysteries, ‘Guilt Trip and Other Stories’ by Lakshmi Kannan is the latest collection from the bilingual writer which is eminently readable. So is Mitra Phukan’s ‘What Will People Say?’ A very different kind of book, one that you will be glad to have read is ‘This Kind of Child: The Disability Story’ by K Srilata. And you should try and get hold of the multi-volume ‘The Mahabharata: Mewari Miniature Paintings (1680-1698) by Allah Baksh (Volume I – IV)’ by Alok Bhalla and Chandra Prakash Deval. A memoir in English by a bilingual writer is interesting for many reasons, including the choice of language — Sara Rai’s ‘Raw Umber: A Memoir’ is quite a treat.

Moving on to translations, one of the books I read and enjoyed is one I reviewed for this paper, ‘First Flood’, the first volume in the translation of Kalki’s ‘Ponniyin Selvan’ by Nandini Krishnan, making the classic available in an accessible translation. The next on my list is another book I reviewed here, ‘I Named My Sister Silence’, translated by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar from the Hindi original, ‘Kaale Adhyaay’, by Manoj Rupda.

This is a punch-in-the-gut book that looks at all kinds of depredation. Other recommended translations are Vivek Shanbhag’s Kannada novel ‘Sakina’s Kiss’, ably translated by Srinath Perur; ‘Tirukkural: The Book of Desire’ translated by Meena Kandasamy; Ponneelan’s Thamizh novel ‘Karisal’ translated by J Priyadharshini (titled ‘Black Soil’ in English); Dalpat Chauhan’s ‘Fear and Other Stories’ translated from Gujarati by Hemang Desai; Perumal Murugan’s Thamizh novel ‘Aalandaapatchi’ translated as ‘Fire Bird’ by Janani Kannan; Shrikant Verma’s ‘Magadh’ translated from Hindi by Rahul Soni, and the second part of the Chandal Jibon trilogy by Manoranjan Byapari translated as ‘The Nemesis’ by V Ramaswamy.

I am reading two promising anthologies at the moment — ‘Contemporary Urdu Short Stories from Kolkata’ translated by Shams Afif Siddiqi and Fuzail Asar Siddiqi, and ‘Selected Short Stories from Assamese Children’s Literature’ (compiled and edited in Assamese by Santanoo Tamuly) translated by Priyakshi Rajguru Goswami. I do not know if writers of yearly round-ups are allowed to mention their own books but let me recommend ‘A Woman Burnt’, my translation of Imayam’s powerful Thamizh novel ‘Sellatha Panam’.

Now that we have the annual ‘Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English’, edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agrawal, do look it up! We had some interesting individual publications as well, none more so than Mehak Goyal’s ‘Failure to Make Round Rotis: Poems on Rebellion, Resilience and Relationships’. An interesting collection is ‘Origami Aai’ by Manjiri Indurkar.

Hoping for another year of pleasurable reading, I am looking forward to ‘Stories by Manto: A Graphic Narrative’ by (eds) Pinaki De and Debkumar Mitra, ‘A History of South India for Children’ by Pradeep Chakravarthy, Higashino’s ‘The Final Curtain’, Rushdie’s ‘Knife’, the two-volume ‘The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction’ edited by Tarun K Saint, and ‘Eden Abandoned: The Story of Lilith’ by Shinie Antony. Also on my list are Rochelle Potkar’s poetry collection ‘Coins in Rivers’, MG Vassanji’s ‘Everything There Is’, Adhir Biswas’ ‘The Last Boy in Class’ (translated by V Ramaswamy), ‘You’ by M Mukundan (translated by Nandakumar K), Jayant Kaikini’s ‘Mithun Number Two and Other Mumbai Stories’ (translated by Tejaswini Niranjana), and ‘Baal-o-Par: Collected Poems by Gulzar’ (translated by Rakhshanda Jalil).

Wishing you all a great 2024!