The Many Lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit: Deeply reported profile of a Muslim woman — an "invisible worker" living on the margins of Delhi — whose life maps, quite precisely, India’s descent into Hindu nationalism from the 1992 riots to the 2020 Delhi riots
For Now it is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul (translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili and Gowhar Yaqoob): Stories on family and friendship published between 1972 and 2001 that capture the erosion of Kashmiriyat
At Home in India by Qurratulain Hyder (edited and translated by Fatima Rizvi and Sufia Kidwai): An anthology of Hyder’s writing — profiles of Urdu women writers, short stories, and extracts from her memoirs about growing up in an elite north Indian Muslim family — altogether encompassing the tectonic shifts of India in the 20th century
Interview: Abraham Verghese, (The Covenant of Water): On being committed to writing the kind of book that he enjoys reading: an epic that covers multiple generations
Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag (translatedby Srinath Perur): an intimate portrait of a middle-class, middle-aged man bewildered and isolated by the changes of modern life
Welcome to Paradise by Twinkle Khanna: Stories, built around batty old women, exploring the entangled themes of ageing, love, loss, family and death
Best Book of 2023: Paul Murray's The Bee Sting
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri: short stories about immigrants in Rome. They are professors, temporary workers, tourists, refugees, children of immigrants... all negotiating their foreignness, sometimes around ordinary circumstances like a simple meal, other times facing racist attacks or hostility
Interview: Azad Essa (Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel): On his book about the historical and evolving relations between India and Israel
Interview: Paul Murray, (The Bee Sting): On family, friendship and climate change — the themes of his Booker-shortlisted tragicomic tome of a novel set in the Irish countryside — and on writing for readers with lower attention spans
Interview: Nishant Injam (The Best Possible Experience): On the disorientation that comes with being an immigrant, culture shock, writing his way out of a software job, and his debut collection of short stories
Quarterlife by Devika Rege: A collective portrait of 2014 through a diverse group of millennials coming into political consciousness in Mumbai
Interview: Ayobami Adebayo, (A Spell of Good Things): On her Booker-longlisted novel about inequalities told through two families in Osun, her home state in Nigeria
History’s Angel by Anjum Hasan, about the life and anxieties of a Muslim schoolteacher in Delhi, set in 2019 leading up to the citizenship bill protests
Interview: Claire Kohda, (Woman, Eating): On being mixed race, the connection between vampires and colonialism, and her protagonist’s imagined sisterhood with Amrita Sher-Gil
Ways of Being: Creative Non-Fiction by Pakistani Women edited by Sabyn Javeri, essays that explores distinctive threads of the political and cultural fabric of Pakistan
We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama, a stunning novel about intergenerational trauma and knowledge passed down through generations of women in a family of Tibetan refugees
Beloved Rongomala by Shaheen Akhtar (translated by Shabnam Nadiya), an intricate and expansive novel built around a Bengali folk ballad about the mistress of a zamindar in the 18th century
The Book of Everlasting Things by Aanchal Malhotra, a novel about a love story cut short by Partition
Stories of the True by Jeyamohan (translated by Priyamvada Ramkumar), a collection of viscerally moving stories based on real people who "lived lives steeped in idealism"
Until Then by Sarayu Srivatsa, set largely in Japan, this novel is a meditation on the recovery of repressed memories to release trauma.
Geeta Rahman at Championship Point by Saskya Jain, about a 12-year-old badminton prodigy growing up in a posh bureaucrat colony in central Delhi in the 1990s
City of Incident: A Novel in Twelve Parts by Annie Zaidi, snapshots of 12 interconnected people in an unnamed city which “will forgive anything and anyone, except for those who delay the trains”
The Time of the Peacock by Siddharth Chowdhury, set in the months after Demonetisation, an insider’s account of New Delhi’s publishing world that is also an account of our times
You People by Nikita Lalwani, about the tangled, precarious lives of asylum seekers and other runaways working in a pizzeria in south-west London
A Time Outside This Time by Amitava Kumar, an amorphous, meta novel about the news in the time of propaganda and lies
Funeral Nights by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, an almost ethnographic novel set in Nongshyrkon, a remote village in the jungles of West Khasi Hills, where a group of academics exchange stories and notes on Khasi folklore, culture and history
Principles of Prediction by Anushka Jasraj, a collection of 13 dreamlike stories on the incomprehensible reality of our inner lives
Undertow by Jahnavi Barua, a minimalist novel set in Assam about regret and reconciliation and how conflict casts its shadow over generations
Girl in White Cotton by Avni Doshi, about a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship in Pune, human fallibility and the unreliability of memory
The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand, a meticulous and gripping biography of Udham Singh who assassinated General Michael O’Dwyer, a former lieutenant governor of Punjab, to avenge the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh
Beasts of Burden by Imayam (translated by Lakshmi Holmström), an intimate portrayal of a Tamil Mahadalit family and caste oppression within Dalit communities
Getting There: A Young Woman’s Quest for Love, Truth and Weight Loss by Manjula Padmanabhan, a kind of travel memoir of a 20-something woman trying to escape the awkwardness of her life and her body
Prelude to a Riot by Annie Zaidi, an exposition of the anxieties of our times. It's about people in a town at the cusp of something — tensions are brewing, indignation has grown into raging entitlement
A Secret History of Compassion by Paul Zacharia, a ridiculously clever novel – too clever for its own good. It’s about a writer, a philosopher and a hangman collaborating to write an essay
Tell Her Everything by Mirza Waheed, a retired doctor recounts his life’s circumstances and choices, presenting a desperate portrait of unrelenting guilt
A Burning by Megha Majumdar, a remarkable trio of characters who will stay with readers even if the novel's political and philosophical underpinnings fade
Estuary by Perumal Murugan, (translated by Nandini Krishnan, a sincere portrayal of the crumbling of a middle-aged middle-class Indian man
My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories by Sumana Roy, short stories about people who suffer from curious ailments
Mother India by Tova Reich, a novel about the adventures of three members of an ultra orthodox Jewish family from Brooklyn in India. It is also about the griminess of the soul
I Have Become the Tide by Githa Hariharan, inter-linked and oversimplified narratives based on the stories of Rohith Vemula, MM Kalburgi and a 12th century Bhakti movement
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, the story of a black couple torn apart by wrongful incarceration and raises questions of duty, justice and love
Interview: Elizabeth Flock (Love and Marriage in Mumbai): Why an American journalist has written a book about three marriages in Mumbai
Interview: Khaled Hosseini (And The Mountains Echoed)
Profile: Dan Brown
Profile: Manjula Padmanabhan
