Six books to bring some joy into your life this winter

As a reader, I usually steer clear of speculative fiction. But when a novel set in a future, climate-ravaged Kolkata (my beloved hometown) appears—and gets selected for Oprah Winfrey’s 119th Book Club—I’m forced to make exceptions.

The truth is, I finished Megha Majumdar’s sophomore book (in many ways a spiritual distant cousin of Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide), titled A Guardian and A Thief, in a single sitting. The novel follows Ma, her father Dadu, and her daughter Mishti as they survive in a flooded City of Joy, facing food shortages while awaiting their “climate visas” to emigrate to Michigan and join Ma’s husband as climate refugees. Chaos erupts when Ma’s purse containing all their documents is stolen by Boomba, a man who will do anything to feed his family. Profound yet racy, the novel spans seven days and shifts perspectives between characters as the eponymous guardian and thief test the limits of their morality in the face of a dying planet and a desperate love for their helpless families.

For those of us who spend a ridiculous amount of time doomscrolling through BookTok and Bookstagram, the name Carol Bolt is hardly unfamiliar. After the success of Book of Answers (my copy still lives by my bedside), the Seattle-based artist returns with another coffee-table hardcover that promises to answer every question a reader has about love. Drawing from the divination art of bibliomancy, Book of Love Answers is a textured object meant to be cherished. Ask a question, flip a page, and let Bolt’s tender, precise, witty, and sometimes salacious prose guide you through the terrains of passion, romance, yearning, and love. As someone who usually roams with a fiction paperback in his bag, I’m a devoted fan of playful hardbounds—and I cannot recommend Bolt’s work enough to others who feel the same. 

One never forgets their first Patti Smith. I, for one, was nowhere near listening to Dancing Barefoot or exploring Horses. A kind Delhi bookshop owner, noticing my Joan Didion and Eve Babitz obsession, recommended Smith’s Just Kids (2010) during university—a suggestion that soon had me collapsing into bed, howling over her casually devastating prose. Reading her latest memoir, Bread of Angels, brought back that first encounter. There is a piercing innocence and wide-eyed wonder in the way Smith writes about her romances with Rimbaud and Bob Dylan, evoking the rush of one’s own early love and heartbreak in a big city. Yet beyond love, loss, and loneliness, this memoir also traces Smith’s almost-Dickensian post-war childhood among siblings and Irish fairy tales, her first steps into poetry and rock, her married life in Michigan, and finally her existence as an untethered vagabond in the modern day.

In retrospect, what are cities except dotted postscripts haunted by memories of yore? Founder of the breakout Instagram platform ‘Itihaasology’, historian and storyteller Eric Chopra offers in Ghosted: Delhi’s Haunted Monuments a compelling, often lyrical retelling of the capital’s history through its many ghosts. But fans of hauntology, be warned—this is no regular ghost story. Drawing on archival research, mythology, and folklore, Chopra reveals a past often overlooked in academic discourses. Familiar sites—Jamali-Kamali in the Qutb complex, the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla Fort, and the bloodied walls of the Mutiny Memorial—come alive through lesser-known narratives of jinns who hear grievances, Sufis who bless monarchs, and jilted begums who linger in hunting lodges. The book becomes both an intimate and sweeping portrait of a city that shaped a civilisation, and a meditation urging urban dwellers to recognise the layered histories we inhabit each day.

On August 15, 1947, the Indian nation woke up to independence. Nearly four decades later, on August 15, 1995, India officially logged on to the internet. Since then, the internet has become an inalienable part of our existence, shaping the choices we make every second. While millennials grew into the strange beast that is the internet, Gen Z was born into it. One of today’s sharpest cultural commentators, Ria Chopra argues in this collection of eight essays, titled Never Logged Out: How The Internet Created India’s Gen Z, that India’s Gen Z and the internet are so intertwined that to understand one, you must understand the other. Fresh, funny, lucid, and rarely dull, Chopra’s non-fiction debut is a sparkling chronicle of the digital age—from the quiet promise of its early years to Bollywood’s awkward attempts at youth culture, clumsy tote bags, viral memes, and finally, AI in our present moment.

Chef Suvir Saran is a man of many wonders. One of the world’s first openly gay chefs, he is the pillar behind Devi—the first Indian restaurant in North America to win a Michelin star—and the force shaping ventures like Bastian in Mumbai and One8 Commune. But in Tell My Mother I Like Boys, Saran turns from his successes to the failures that led him there. In deeply felt yet restrained prose, this memoir feels like the sharp, familiar touch of monsoon rain. Its pages hold a chronicle of India—its pluralities, riches, and cruelties—alongside the promise of the American dream, the loneliness of exile, and the ache of unbelonging. The prick of its first touch notwithstanding, the book slowly envelops you, revealing the radical power of coming together over shared histories—and food—even in our darkest moments. 

IMAGES: COURTESY BLOOMSBURY INDIA AND PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

This article first appeared in the December 2025 issue of Harper's Bazaar India 

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