The literary fiction and translated books everyone should be reading right now

Madhabi’s Garden is a moving and richly acted Madhabi Mukherjee (translated by Arunava Sinha) whose life unfolded amidst political upheaval, artistic revolution, and personal defiance far beyond the silver screen that made her immortal. From the blood-soaked streets of Calcutta during the 1946 riots to the luminous glow of world cinema, Mukherjee’s life is a story of rebellion, resilience, and uncompromising integrity. For generations of film lovers, she was Charulata, the unforgettable presence at the heart of Satyajit Ray’s cinematic masterpiece.

But the woman behind the role was shaped by forces far more complex than any script. Born into privilege and thrust into poverty, Mukherjee grew up in a household driven by clashing ideals: a scholarly, conservative father and a fiercely independent mother whose audacity led her young daughter to the stage. Written with disarming honesty, Madhabi’s Garden is a candid exploration of ambition and sacrifice, friendships and heartbreaks, glamour and loneliness behind the curtains. Rich in cultural history and personal insight, this memoir chronicles the story of a woman who defied convention, embraced contradiction, and carved her own path on screen and beyond it.

Lázár is a sweeping gothic saga by 23-year-old author Nelio Biedermann, one who, with this work, has proven himself as one of the most definitive voices of the first wave of Gen Z writers. This novel follows the fate of the titular Hungarian dynasty that has ruled for generations from their ancient castle by the edge of a dark forest, compelling all entrants into madness, death, and vice. In the final days of the Habsburg Monarchy, Lajos von Lázár was born to this family. When Lajos inherits his legacy, the dynasty at last has a baron who promises to reignite the old splendours, except that his abilities are barely proof against the ravages of war and occupation.

It will eventually fall to his children to find a way to stand against oppression and take the first steps towards freedom in the Hungarian National Uprising of 1956. Translated by Jamie Bulloch, Lázár is captivating, vivid, and creates an intriguing atmosphere of repression and furtive but robust sexuality. There’s a great deal to admire in this work; at its most poignant moments, the influences, even borrowed allusions, of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann are unmistakable. 

Ever since the publication of the first book, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s now-six-part series about the fabled Funiculi Funicula café in Tokyo has had audiences all over the world in a chokehold. The premise has been simple: a series of poignantly imagined stories about people who can travel back in time for the sake of love, with the caveat of returning before their coffee turns cold.

In Before I Knew I Loved You, Kawaguchi returns to the warm heart of this mysterious Japanese café with another four guests whose luminous stories of love are reaffirming as they are heartbreaking. In this book, we meet a girl who wishes to make amends with the mother she never accepted, a man who waited for a reply from his girlfriend, and never heard from her; a woman anxious to travel ahead to know what her future holds; and a student who travels back to meet his long-deceased father again. Continuing to work the same premise, Kawaguchi brings a simple, yet heartening sense of joy, yet again with this core belief in love as the most eternal, hopeful force in our human lives.

Tara Menon’s oceanic debut, Under Water, is as much an ode to the love and grief of friendship as it is to the bonds and pain we share with the slowly dying waterbodies around us in this era of unprecedented climate change. When six-year-old Marissa loses her mother, she is taken by her father to live on a small Thai island in the Andaman Sea. There, she forms a deep friendship with Arielle (the pun on the name, dear reader, is intended) and together they explore the fragile wonders of its forests, reefs, and beaches full of manta rays.

Then, on Boxing Day 2004, when the Indian Ocean tsunami made landfall, the girls were swept up by the first wave and separated. Eight years later, Marissa is living in New York, spending her days wandering through the city like a ghost and her nights seeking solace in the lonely beds of strangers. As the city prepares for the devastating Hurricane Sandy, Marissa reflects on her past and learns how to sustain herself in a precarious world. Menon employs a deeply empathetic yet fragmented writing style in this book, conveying the complexities of being met with incomprehensible loss in one’s early years.

I discovered the complex joy that resided within the heart of Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton novels when I read her 2022 Booker-nominated title, Oh William!. Her works have a searing, poignant vision of small-town lives with a deeply felt, affective meditation upon the complexities of marriage and the relationships outside of it. In The Things We Never Say, Strout follows a similar lineage of storytelling by introducing us to Artie Dam, a man with a secret. Dam spends his days teaching history to high schoolers, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most.

He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbours, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. Despite this appearance of beauteous pleasantness, he is plagued by feelings of isolation as he looks upon a world gone mad and ponders upon questions of closeness, connection, and intimacy in a world increasingly torn apart by globalisation. With her trademark measured prose and profound lyrical insight, Strout’s new fiction effectively captures the way grief reverberates through decades, the comfort found in deep friendships, and the freedom that comes when we break free of our secrets.

Borrowing a leaf from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Yann Martel’s latest work of fiction, titled Son of Nobody, follows the life of Harlow Donne who has devoted himself to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. In the depths of the Bodleian Library, he discovers a lost account of the Trojan War in an epic poem form, which he names The Psoad after its protagonist—a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea but known to all as ‘son of nobody’.

As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and despite the 2,000-year gap in time, a universal song of homesickness, regret, ambition, love, and grief emerges. Martel’s work is far from structural innovation—the dubious motivations of a scholar clearly harken back to the works of Shelley, and in recent years, plenty of writers have returned to Homeric epics to offer alternate viewpoints to the masculine, military, monolithic account of the Trojan War. Yet, Martel achieves a strange creative genius with this work, which not only presents us with Harlow’s story but also 30 stanzas of The Psoad itself—the creative energy to write which must be acknowledged as no mean feat.

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar India's April-May 2026 print issue.

Lead image: Amazon India 

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