Six books to kickstart the new year with fiction, memoir, and modern classics

Continuing his obsession with the magic and measured cruelty of the Sunderban mangroves in the Indo-Gangetic delta, Ghost-Eye marks a return to fiction for Booker-nominated author Amitav Ghosh. In lucid prose peppered with pages of laboriously researched history, the novel follows the story of Varsha Gupta, a three-year-old child from a strictly vegetarian business family in Kolkata of the 1970s, as she wakes up one day, demands to eat fish and begins recalling memories of a past life inside a mud house by the river. Thrown into an immediate crisis, the family calls in psychologist and academic Dr Shoma Bose—a visionary way ahead of her times and one deeply interested in the lores of reincarnation. As the novel unfolds, a quick succession of fateful events draw a close to Shoma’s case file on Varsha, until decades later when they are hunted down by a group of environmental activists with the aid of her pandemic-struck, Brooklyn-based nephew Dinu. The novel is a thrillingly spare chronicle of an intergenerational, continent-spanning family saga that raises deep-seated questions about the fragility of the planet we inhabit, the choices that turn our lives upside down, the immeasurable cruelties of fate and the price of forgiveness.

A groundbreaking historiography on the invisiblised histories of female creatives in the theatre space of Kerala, Sajitha Madathil’s 2010 polemic returns to a wider national audience in this vastly researched and patiently weighted translation by Jayasree Kalathil. Part of a series of new non-fiction translations from Indian languages titled ‘Chronicles’, the book, For the Love of Art: Lost Histories of Women In Kerala Theatre, addresses a major lacuna that exists in recountings of the history of Kerala’s mainstream theatre scene—one that repeatedly omits the role and contribution of female creatives. For decades, the industry has seen men direct and act in plays—often essaying female characters themselves—at the cost of repeatedly relegating female characters to the back and reducing them to a ghostly presence. Madathil’s meticulously researched book offers a timely, and a firstof-its-kind history of women playwrights from the state who not only wrote, but also acted in plays. From stories of plays by women that were passed on in the mainstream as being written by their sons, to first-hand accounts of women coming to terms with the violence of performance and embodying female characters hitherto only essayed by men in drag—the book is a complex, and comprehensive account of Kerala’s complicated socio-cultural history and feminist dramaturgy in our country.

One of the most anticipated memoirs of our times, two-time Booker-winning author Margaret Atwood’s memoir is a sum total of an 85-year-long life lived to the brim. Yet it rarely shows glimpses of the triumphalist tone that characterises works like this. Instead, Book of Lives is sharp and self-deprecatingly funny, and traces the life of one of the most defining voices of our times. Instead of throwing the reader into a world of excessive dinner parties, scandal or substance, Atwood joyously disappoints by taking us to her humble beginnings in the north of Quebec, where being the daughter of an insect-obsessed father meant spending six months of the year in the forest without electricity, running water or telephone every year. From this we follow her into her first short-story triumph in school (an event that makes way into her 1988 novel Cat’s Eye), to her Harvard days with literary giants like Northup Frye, and eventually her time in a 1980s politically divided Berlin where her long-standing fascination with the Salem witch trials and the largely patriarchal moorings of Harvard give birth to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Fan or not, this book is an essential reading for anyone who cares about catching a glimpse into the minds of one of the most foundational literary imaginations of our times.

Growing up in a Bengali household, with Hindi as my second language in school, one of my greatest disappointments was never being able to share with my poetry-loving mother, the deeply felt, yet cautiously measured verses of Mahadevi Varma. Arguably one of the most important voices of 20th century Indian literature, two of Varma’s pen-portraits Ateet ke Chalchitra (1941) and Smriti ki Rekhayein (1943) find new life in this tender translation, titled Portraits from Memory, by Ruth Vanita. Within the pages of this book, one finds the touching life stories of a farmer’s little son who exchanges his clothes for a watermelon to present to his teacher and a poor woman who supports her family single-handedly only to dream of education in her next birth along with glimpses of Varma’s own life as a single woman in the 20th century—living life, travelling, and forming friendships on her own terms and conditions.

That rare book which you will be compelled to finish in one sitting, Tripurari Sharan’s Our Madhopur Home is a breathless family saga that unfolds over three generations and a hundred years. Taking place in rural Bihar, and translated by the inimitable Arunava Sinha, the book is a tender examination of familial ties as they fade over time in a world that forces us to take up selfishly peripatetic existences. It also is a sordid examination of the remnants of the colonial zamindari system and the poverty that it leaves behind. Told from the whimsical, yet unbiased perspective of the family’s beloved dog Laura, the novel follows the life of its central patriarch as he comes to grasp and understand the fast moving and often faltering choices and motivations of his family members. This book is an essential read for anyone looking to piece together the state’s critical evolution over the years.

The latest novel by the Booker-winning author of The Sense of An Ending (2011) follows two stories. Of a man named Stephen and a woman Jean, who first fall in love when they are young, and once again when they are old. Second, is the story of an elderly man called Jimmy who stands inevitably oblivious to his own mortality. In her typical lyrical verse, filled with the most beautiful images of mundane human existence, Julian Barnes returns to some of her recurrent themes of memory and frailty once again with this novel, titled Departure(s). In her unerring empathy she asks of us, through her triptych of characters, if it really matters to remember what happened or if it is enough to simply be remembered? Further expanding upon themes that she engaged with in her 2011 masterpiece, this is a highly evolved, yet non-indulgingly restrained work by an author at her creative highest asking of us what it truly means to say goodbye.

Images: Courtesy Amazon.in

This article first appeared in the January 2026 issue of Harper's Bazaar India 

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