The best new books and modern classics to add to your reading list

Forty years ago, Vikram Seth was a student of Economics at Stanford University, when while researching his dissertation he stumbled upon Charles Johnstone’s translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Inspired to write a similar novel in verse (the Onegin stanza to be specific), Seth’s debut novel, The Golden Gate, till date bears the mark of a rich literary oeuvre marked by the linguistic simplicity and profound affective depths of lyric poetry. Following the lives of a group of yuppies in the San Francisco Bay Area, the novel follows the story of John Brown and his disappointment at learning that his former lover Janet has put out an advertisement on his behalf in the newspaper, seeking a life partner for John. When the advertisement leads to John stumbling into the astonishing Liz, and subsequently marrying her, Seth regales us with a fictional verse that, in true epical fashion, recounts the myriad lives of John and Liz’s friends in a fine blend of the tragic and comic genres that would go on to become the author’s trademarks. Awarded the Sahitya Academy Award in 1988 for its deft portrayal of fleeting human emotions and masterful spin on genre, the novel continues to be an enduring meditation on addiction, sexuality, tolerance, and faith.

A Booker-winning novel by Aravind Adiga, and a Balzac-like satire on globalisation, class, caste, and individualism, The White Tiger turns 18 and quite literally comes of age this year. Following the story of the protagonist Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of the corporate boom and entrepreneurship in Bangalore, the novel is rife with mischief, amorality, and irreverence. On the eve of the Chinese president’s impending trip to the city, Halwai writes a retrospective letter to the Premiere over seven nights, recounting his time as a driver to an uber-rich family in New Delhi, an unforeseen accident leading to multiple cover-ups, and a great escape to Bangalore leading to a life spent in what Adiga describes as India’s “Rooster Coop”. Scathing in its humour, shiftily unreliable in its narration, and never shying away from moral ambiguity, Adiga’s coming-of-age story continues to remain a fierce indictment of the rural-urban divide in contemporary India.

A deeply moving saga of queer lives in contemporary India (Kolkata to be precise), Rahul Singh’s debut novel, Unfolding, eschews usual established narratives of trauma and coming-out to look at Ralph and Ojas, a couple in their thirties with divergent domestic interests. While Ralph longs for a steady relationship, Ojas wants to continue with their open arrangement. Meanwhile, Ralph’s house help Zubina faces a crisis of her own—after walking in on the couple in a moment of tenderness, she starts questioning her own marriage that has produced two children, but little else. As Ralph tries to retain a sense of equanimity under the shadow of Ojas’s decision, and as Zubina struggles to understand the foundations of her own married life, both find themselves beset similarly by deep restlessness and confusion. Cutting through the societal norms of class and faith, this tender novel confronts the wayward ways of the heart and in the process articulates the true price of love, and the meaning of finding one’s road back home.

Following the success of his globally feted novel Butter, Asako Yuzuki returns with an amply delicious, but equally disturbing story of an adulterous obsession between Eriko, a trading company employee, and Shoko, a housewife, in Hooked. Despite having the perfect life on the surface, and being tasked by her company with the ambitious project of reintroducing the controversial Nile perch fish into the Japanese market, Eriko suffers from a deep-seated sense of loneliness that no one around her seems to notice. Until, she stumbles on Shoko’s unconventional, yet popular blog, underscoring details of her eating out of a convenience store and living in an untidy apartment—a stark contrast to the stereotypical image of Japanese domesticity. But as Eriko tracks Shoko down to a restaurant and begins to befriend her, the readers are sent down an uncomfortable vortex of events that begin to blur the distinctions between friendship and obsession until finally the author muses, “Would Eriko mind being savaged, if it is her best friend doing the savaging?” Moving at breakneck speed, and a true currency of a renewed global interest in Japanese fiction, this translation by Polly Barton is an absolute keepsake for your shelf (if not for its beguiling feminist politics, then for its deep, fuchsia cover jacket alone).

Growing up, the erstwhile Saraswati river from the Vedic ages was curiously my favourite river of all time. There was something about the river being named after my favourite goddess from the Hindu pantheon (can you tell I was an insufferable nerd all my school life?), and its mysterious drying up/disappearance that always appeared like an enigma to me. Blending political satire with ecological parables, Gurnaik Johal’s bold, capacious debut, Saraswati, finds the lives of seven individuals transformed, as this river of a thousand legends suddenly springs back to life in a rapidly changing contemporary India. Johal’s—whose restraint and ability to execute full command over his sentences reveal a deeper mastery of short-form fiction—host of characters include Satnam who arrives in his ancestral village for his grandmother’s funeral and finds himself caught up in a contentious scheme to unearth the lost river as an act of Hindu nationalist pride. In this, he is also joined by a Canadian eco-saboteur, a Mauritian pest exterminator, and (wait for it) a Bollywood stunt double. An absolute tour de force, the novel’s unstable blend of realism and allegory ultimately collapses in the face of its central inquiry of a centuries-old civilisation now plagued with crippling dogmatism and jingoism.

The Vegetarian, the novel that won Han Kang the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, still haunts me. Before The Vegetarian—a searing meditation on trauma, food and memory told in three parts—I was not familiar with Kang’s work. But what struck me most was her ability to conjure images of a deeply visceral quality with the sparest of prose; images that feel sentiently seductive yet affectively repulsive. In We Do Not Part, published in a new translation by E Yaewon and Paige Morris, Kang follows her structural and stylistic codes by telling us the story of Kyungha who travels from Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island to meet an old friend Inseon, following a tragic accident. The trip is not without its agenda: Kyungha must feed her ailing friend’s pet bird, lest she dies. When an unexpected snow storm upends her trip, Kyungha finds her spiralling and descending into an unprecedented maze of memories and dreams where her friendly quest turns into a confrontation with the island’s own tragic political history. A hymn to friendship, a eulogy to the imagination, and above all an indictment against forgetting, the novel is both an act of witness and a beautiful poetic object.

Images: Courtesy Amazon India

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

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