Fiction

THE NOISE OF TIME (Jonathan Cape) By Julian Barnes

The very first sentence - "All he knew was that this was the worst time" - says much about the mind of this fictional biography's subject. He is the 20th-century Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich's career mostly spanned the years of Stalin's reign - and herein lies the problem which both made and unmade him. He achieved fame early in life, only to suffer a severe fall from grace - Stalin's grace - till he was reinstated in the regime's favour. Then he fell, and was given back his place, again. The ups and downs continued throughout Shostakovich's career and made a mental wreck of this habitually nervous man. They also gave his works their ambivalence - there is an ebullience on the surface that, by its very excess, hints at the dark matter it seeks to conceal. Barnes's prose is as ambivalent - his neat little sentences seem to resist chaos and speak of a mind staring at the abyss.

THE BONES OF GRACE: A NOVEL (Hamish Hamilton) By Tahmima Anam

Here again is Shostakovich - at a concert of his music, Zubaida Haque, the protagonist, meets and falls in love with Elijah Strong. But this love is not meant to be, because Zubaida, who belongs to an immigrant family settled in America, must go in search of her roots. The journey takes her to Chittagong, where she finds Grace - a decommissioned ship. Zubaida's life seems to unravel among the dismantled ships in the port city. If Zubaida is too precious to be likeable, her description of the lives of exploited labourers is realistic.

THE VEGETARIAN: A NOVEL (Portobello) By Han Kang

In this dreamlike novel, silence is punctuated with the high-pitched clamour of violence. Yeong-hye's horror of the flesh makes her turn into a vegetarian and then to stop eating altogether. The sparse prose mimics the project of the hunger artist, who strives to strip bone of meat to arrive at the essence, which might be another word for nothingness.

A BOOK OF LIGHT: WHEN A LOVED ONE HAS A DIFFERENT MIND (Speaking Tiger) Edited by Jerry Pinto

This collection opens up conversation on the taboo subject of mental illness. In the process, it becomes an analysis of love, which also involves understanding the Other, who has a different mind. The editor, Jerry Pinto, has won this year's Sahitya Akademi Award for Em and the Big Hoom, a novel where he explores his difficult love for his mother, who had bipolar disorder. The pieces in this collection are disturbing, searing - they reaffirm love as a force which persists not just in spite of difference but crucially because of it.

SELECTION DAY (Fourth Estate) By Aravind Adiga

Set in Bombay, Aravind Adiga's latest novel is predictably gritty. It touches upon a wide range of issues - from the illusion of choice, the fallouts of capitalism, the cultural baggage of colonized countries, Indo-Anglian writing, to Section 377 - while talking cricket. This is a feat in itself, if the achievements of the young cricketer, Manjunath Kumar, whom the novel celebrates, were not enough.

THE SCHOOLDAYS OF JESUS (Harvill Secker) By J.M. Coetzee

The fugitive Holy Family from The Childhood of Jesus has driven from the nowhere town of Novilla to the "garden place" of Estrella. The boy, Davíd, is now six. The migration of the family has a disturbing resonance in a world where displaced people set sail on hostile seas and are washed up, dead and alive, on the stranger shores of 21st-century Europe. Davíd gets admitted to an academy "devoted to the training of the soul through music and dance". In this quasi-academic setting, what breaks out is not only the madness of sexual violence, but also the higher madness of dance as the ideal synthesis of body and soul, of measure and movement. Coetzee's bleached prose conveys much more than what it actually says.

PUBLIC LIBRARY AND OTHER STORIES (Hamish Hamilton) By Ali Smith

According to the author, this collection is about the "ways in which our public library tradition is being traduced, pressurised, changed and taken from us without us seeing it." The stories are neither set in a library, nor do they always talk of one. Each piece, however, is a lament and a plea for those magical spaces. The pieces make readers want to visit a library to find the books Smith talks about instead of just searching for them online.

A RISING MAN (Harvill Secker) By Abir Mukherjee

The individual referred to in the title is Captain Sam Wyndham, a disillusioned World War I veteran and former Scotland Yard detective, who comes all the way to Calcutta in 1919 as an officer in the Imperial Bengal Police Force. A British burra sahib is savagely murdered in the bylanes of Calcutta and Wyndham's career in India takes off. The narrative moves swiftly between the Black Town and the White Town, Lal Bazar and Bagh Bazar, Alipore and Cossipore and Serampore and the city in between, not forgetting Sonagachi and Tiretta Bazar. Mukherjee makes an impressive debut with this crime thriller.

THE WIDOW (Bantam) By Fiona Barton

Some books gain with the hype around them, some books do not. Fiona Barton's first novel belongs to the second group. It is an interesting read, no doubt, but it is certainly not an 'unputdownable' psychological thriller along the lines of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, as its promotional matter insists. It is the unravelling of the tangled skeins of relationship that is far more important in the novel than the mystery.

 

Non-fiction

1962: THE WAR THAT WASN'T  (Aleph) By Shiv Kunal Verma

This is a meticulous investigation of India's worst military debacle. Verma's indictment of the then political leadership is notable, as is his detailing of the weaknesses of India's armed forces that resulted in the humiliation.

THE CALLING OF HISTORY: SIR JADUNATH SARKAR AND HIS EMPIRE OF TRUTH (Permanent Black) By Dipesh Chakrabarty

An extraordinary project of retrieval and restoration, the book, written with great empathy, examines the works of an outstanding historian. Chakrabarty also looks at historiography in a new way even though he keeps his focus on one historian.

TAMIL: A BIOGRAPHY (Belknap) By David Shulman

In this curious offering, Shulman presents the biography of a language - Tamil - which is renowned for its antiquity as well as for its political overtones in modern times. This a work that would benefit those adept in the language and also those who are yet to savour its richness.

THE GENE: AN INTIMATE HISTORY (Allen Lane) By Siddhartha Mukherjee

Things - physical traits, for instance - get passed from one generation to another. Mukherjee not only explains the intricacies of the transmission but also tells the story of the discovery of an elusive, yet fundamental, particle in a masterful and intimate manner.

INCARNATIONS: INDIA IN 50 LIVES (Allen Lane) By Sunil Khilnani

The author brings to light India's past through the lives, times and ideas of some its iconic figures. The novelty of Khilnani's approach, the lucidity of the text and the balanced portrayals add to the pleasure of rediscovering India.

THE GREAT DERANGEMENT: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE UNTHINKABLE (Allen Lane) By Amitav Ghosh

Books on the crises in the Anthropocene age are not rare. But Ghosh brings to his analysis of climate change not cold statistics but the power of stories. The scrutiny of the collective indifference towards an unfolding disaster is made richer by Ghosh's decision to look at climate change's relationship with fiction and politics.

DEMOCRATS AND DISSENTERS (Allen Lane) By Ramachandra Guha

Why is dissent a cuss word today, given that democracy is often born of it? This collection of insightful essays by one of India's finest historians probes such crucial questions while attempting to evaluate the failings of Indian democracy through an impartial comparison between different eras and diverse political dispensations.

AN ERA OF DARKNESS: THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN INDIA (Aleph) By Shashi Tharoor

India is yet to shed the burden of its colonial legacy. This is only to be expected, given the deep imprint of the raj on the mind of the people and its disastrous economic repercussions. Tharoor resurrects some of these horrors, repudiating the scholarship that views colonialism through a rose-tinted lens.

 

Memoirs & Biographies

HALF LION: HOW P.V. NARASIMHA RAO TRANSFORMED INDIA (Viking) By Vinay Sitapati A path-breaking biography of India's most underestimated prime minister based on privileged access to Narasimha Rao's private papers. The book shows how Rao, through very skilful navigation, transformed India's economy and foreign policy. It also describes Rao's dilemmas in the face of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Often tending to be too justificatory of Rao's decisions and inactions but nonetheless a masterly account.

STROKE OF GENIUS: VICTOR TRUMPER AND THE SHOT THAT CHANGED CRICKET (Simon & Schuster) By Gideon Haigh This is a cricket book like no other. At one level, it is an analysis of perhaps the most famous cricket photograph - Victor Trumper jumping out to drive. At another level, it is the story of the life and career of a legendary batsman and a gentle human being. It is also an account of how action photography evolved and how the art of batsmanship changed and developed. It is based on detailed research and a great deal of perception.

THE CAULIFLOWER (William Heinemann) By Nicola Barker Although Nicola Barker's narrative begins with Sri Ramakrishna's childhood, the reader should not conclude that it continues in a linear fashion, as most conventional biographies do. There are digressions, sound-effects and film takes interspersed with haikus. It is a shuffling of the cards, a rearrangement of the pieces. What is captivating about this book is that Barker sees the drama of Sri Ramakrishna's story. A remarkable achievement from an author who has never been to India.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË: A FIERY HEART (Knopf) By Claire Harman Harman does not spend too much time reading Charlotte's unconscious into her novels. She sticks to the conscious: Harman looks for the undocumented history of real objects - such as a lock of Charlotte's hair found among the memorabilia later given away by the Brontës' tutor, Constantin Héger - in incidents described in Charlotte's novels. The connections she makes are too literal at times, but are worth pondering.