2024: A year in books

A look at the stand-out books this year, in no particular order.

Non-fiction

By Sheila Kumar

It has been quite a marvellous year for non-fiction releases and it is as hard a task as ever to choose a few. No matter how fair one wishes to be, the list is bound to be subjective. That said, these are the stand-out books for me this year, in no particular order. 

From Phansi Yard, My Year with the Women of Yerawada by Sudha Bharadwaj (Juggernaut)

An incredibly moving collection of 76 vignettes of women inmates the activist and lawyer met during her stay at the Yerawada Jail. These are tales of extreme privation — of 77 women because we must include the author — written with much felicity and a remarkable absence of bitterness. "She is different in the way political prisoners often are; they don’t come with a burden of guilt, they retain their dignity and encourage others to pluck up courage," writes Bharadwaj of another prisoner. She could well be describing herself.

The Golden Road by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury)

Here, Dalrymple posits that India's connections to both East and West had laid the Golden Road many years before China's Silk Road became a major trading route. By the time you are done reading about Buddhism's spread across Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Java, Korea, Japan, all the way into China; how Hinduism cut a swathe through southeast Asia, culminating in the greatest Indic temple in the world, Angkor Wat; and how Indian mathematical and astronomical theories made their way westwards to eventually reach Europe, you are not only convinced that we were indeed a trading superpower back in the day, you also feel a swell of pride at how adeptly India used its soft powers to influence people across the world.

The Many Lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit (Juggernaut)

Veteran journalist Neha Dixit's first book is an excellent piece of reportage. There is no soft immersion involved here; we meet the protagonist of the book, Syeda, and are taken along on a roller-coaster ride of her life and times. It is both humbling and shameful to see what little space the Syedas occupy, the social discrimination they face, and how little impact government policies have on them. Dixit's work is richly sewn together with statistics,  all of which expose the hollowness of claims of inclusivity.

The Cobra's Gaze by Stephen Alter (Aleph)

In an intense effort to show us the missing link between animals, birds and humans, how we perceive other species through our sensory bubble, project human expectations on them, and then proceed to exploit and destroy, Stephen Alter's book is as much travel memoir as a conservation textbook. There is much information but absolutely no preaching here on how we are putting the big squeeze on animal habitats across the country, how over-tourism in wildlife parks causes untold damage to the species that inhabit them, and how we need to get our act together vis-à-vis nature protection and conservation.

Knife by Salman Rushdie (Penguin)

The opening line of Knife is hard to beat: “At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.” Grievously wounded in an attack that lasted 27 seconds, the writer eventually emerged after a slow and painful recuperation and recovery period, having lost one eye, with one hand seriously damaged, a deep cut on his tongue, fluid collecting in one lung, a cancer scare, and a host of attendant problems. Naturally, the refrain in his head is why, and it's a cry of despair from one who had a fatwa put on his life 33 years ago and had only just stopped running and hiding.

City on Fire by Zayed Khan (HarperCollins)

The political becomes personal in this memoir, in which journalist Zeyad Khan casts a largely dispassionate eye on his hometown Aligarh, a city of a million people in western UP. He tells of the mohallas of the city which witness repeated violence expressed on different levels, starting with taunts, loud aggressive protests, stone-throwing, arson, physical attacks, and ending with acts of murder. The author shows how the normalisation of these violent cycles is the only way for Aligarh to move on and his calls for forgiveness, co-existence, and empathy cannot but fail to move readers.

H-Pop by Kunal Purohit (HarperCollins)

A chilling, compelling read wherein journalist Purohit shines a Klieg light on how the right-wing uses pop culture to disseminate the most vicious kind of propaganda. We meet YouTube artistes, comedians, journalists, and poets, who push the Hindutva agenda in the crudest, crassest manner possible, and reap gainful harvests, to no one's real surprise. This is one scary playlist.

Fiction

By Saurabh Sharma

Retrospective reflections are often flawed, for they are hinged on the idea of memorialising, a bias-infested exercise. While the opening sentence of this glimpse of 2024 in fiction appears to be an apology, it’s still an attempt to celebrate the refreshing styles of fiction that must be revisited as one gears oneself towards another year of promising storytelling.

First, debut novels. General Firebrand and His Red Atlas (Seagull) by Tathagata Bhattacharya is an exceptional, shape-shifting work. It offers an insight into how wars tend to shape not only operational politics but also everyday life. In telling the story of a recovered alcoholic, General Firebrand, Bhattacharya leverages techniques that aren’t usually blended to drive the narrative. Historical figures interrupt and weird creatures dominate various junctures of this novel as Bhattacharya manoeuvres it with finesse, proffering a sneak peek into the past and the crumbling state of the present-day world.

Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari’s multi-award-winning novel Chronicle of an Hour and a Half (Context) impressively presents polyphonic and compartmentalised worldviews of people in a small village in Kerala when they’re faced with a scandalous rumour. However, it can be a reductive reading of this book, as its power lies in its unsentimental and noncommittal humorous gazing at motherhood, marital life, gender-based violence, and hyper-localness in the internet age.

In contrast, the intergenerational grief transfer permeates American writer Paul Yoon’s short-story collection, The Hive and the Honey (Scribner). Sample this activity from the story Valley of the Moon. After returning from war to his native place, Tongsu — without even a prime mover, as if he’ll lose the rhythm of the day if he doesn’t do that — begins to collect bones of animals that he remembered roaming around in his hometown. It’s a refreshing metaphor, signalling how one collects pieces of the past.

Percival Everett's James (Mantle) renders voice to a slave by retelling Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). While race is something that Everett’s works principally feature, it’s satire that breathes life into them. In James, one can find this in a conversation between Jim and Miss Watson, which results in the two laughing. But Jim is laughing at a White person’s arrogance about what a slave got to do with literature, while Miss Watson is convinced that she was foolish to think that Jim would enter Judge Thatcher’s library, making James a timeless masterpiece depicting the power of language.

The Book of Exodus (Vintage) by V J James is another exhilarating work of fiction. This debut novel was published 25 years ago, and has been translated into English for the first time by Ministhy S. A blend of philosophical innuendos and myth-historical contexts, the novel is peerless when it comes to producing a rich, deeply textured, and complex portrayal of life in the backwaters of Kochi.

Anita Desai masters subliminal storytelling once again, with Rosarita (Picador). Indirectness is her way of introducing readers to a past that hasn’t been reconciled. While one is bound to be mesmerised by the loneliness of Bonita as she tries to locate herself in a foreign land, it’s the layered sub-context that comes through in this slim novel that forces its readers to face the consequences of a country’s historical baggage.

With her Booker-winning novel Orbital (Vintage), Samantha Harvey utilises time, distance, and space in the most unlikely way. From a space shuttle, her characters look at the Earth and are forced to confront its tumbling beauty in all its complexity. Grief, gender, and hyper-nationalism are a few aspects that she explores in this tiny volume alongside several other pressing issues facing life on Earth.

Rachel Cusk in her Goldsmiths Prize-winning Parade (Faber & Faber) challenges the readers to look at art and the artist in a new dimension. Cusk refuses to offer different names to these artists, all of whom are named G and offers a submission that perhaps all of them are alike in one way or the other. Parade upends the notions of storytelling by weaving autobiographical elements in essay-like storytelling.