Sayantan Ghosh

There’s plenty to take away from journalist-author Ravish Kumar’s life and body of work over the years, but one can draw inspiration from the most unlikely corners, such as his stories in A City Happens in Love – chronicling the little details of love and longing in the cramped recesses of big city life.

Shane Warne would have turned fifty-four this week. That's sadly not meant to be and now the closest we can get to this modern-day maestro is either through highlights of his career, and there are so many, on YouTube videos or reading about his life. And this stream-of-consciousness memoir from Shane, written with the help of commentator and broadcaster Mark Nicholas, is perhaps always going to be the best place to start.

This past week was all about the moon. We continue to reach out to every poet's favourite celestial body that lights up our night sky, and maybe someday our species will find a way to colonise it too. Tom Gauld’s Mooncop imagines that scenario and goes beyond – told from the perspective of a nameless lunar policeman on the moon who goes about his days, solving petty problems of the few remaining inhabitants.

As a reader and citizen of this country – which is still unable to junk the stench of the regressive caste system into the garbage bin of history – you must read the astonishing Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla. Most “upper caste” people who were born and raised in India have at least once said or heard someone say: “I’m not aware of my caste.” Gidla’s simply told yet deeply affecting book must be kept on the bedside table of all of them.

This is a collection of stories about the private lives of ordinary, working-class Japanese men who are struggling to make ends meet – performing menial and physically laborious jobs – offered to us without any hint of judgement.

Oh William! is the third book in the Lucy Barton series by Elizabeth Strout, and how it got its title is a little story in itself. When My Name Is Lucy Barton, the very first Lucy Barton book, was about to be staged in New York, Strout was observing the gifted actor Laura Linney – who was playing the lead – in her rehearsal space.

Today's recommendation is Manu S Pillai's delightfully brisk 2019 anthology titled The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History. Unlike his other books, this collection presents a series of essays that also tells India's story but through short and compelling unconnected chapters.

Until yesterday, I hadn't been able to decide the name of the book I should be talking about in this week's column. When a couple of days ago, a war broke out on where-else-but-Twitter between vegetarians and non-vegetarians.

The film, like most screen adaptations, failed to do justice to the evocative and atmospheric text on which it is based, even though both are created by noted Marathi filmmaker and writer Sachin Kundalkar.

There’s an unmatched element of fury in Argentine avant-garde author Samanta Schweblin’s writing, especially in her short fiction, that leaves you physically discomfited as a reader.

Booker Prize nominee The Trees takes place in a Mississippi town notorious for its racism. But this time, it's the white townsfolk that is being brutally murdered instead.

Lars Kepler is the pseudonym of the wife-and-husband writing team Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril, authors of the Joona Linna books, originally published in Swedish since 2009. The Fire Witness is the third addictive thriller in Kepler’s globally bestselling Scandinavian crime fiction series featuring the silver-grey-eyed detective Linna.

Before she had finally landed a publishing deal, CJ Tudor was told by an agent that her particular style of writing – a mix of horror and mystery – wasn't 'publishable'. Ironically, it's this very nature of her books that has put her in a unique place of her own in the canon of contemporary thriller writers today. 

Detective Kaga, reputedly onetime all-Japan kendo champion, who was introduced to the world in Keigo Higashino's earlier novel Malice, returns in Newcomer, wearing a perpetual laidback expression and dressed in short-sleeved shirts worn over T-shirts.

It's June and that means it's now officially summer in Delhi and I thought maybe it's a good time to shred the seriousness and have some fun with a few summer reads instead. At least that'll be my intent in the rest of the columns this month.

Mexican writer Fernando Melchor's third novel Paradais made it to the longlist for the International Booker Prize in 2022.

Earlier this week, cinephiles all over the world celebrated the centenary birth anniversary of one of the greatest Indian film directors who ever walked – Mrinal Sen. About a week before that, Seagull Books of Calcutta republished a lost gem, Mrinal Sen’s memoir – Always Being Born. On the publisher's page it reads: 'An outspoken memoir by a much-celebrated Indian filmmaker.'

Bruce Chatwin's final novel before his early death presents an unlikely hero to us – one Kaspar Joachim Utz, an intriguing MittelEuropean character of petty nobility, of a Czech-German-Jewish background, an erudite man living in a two-room apartment in Prague in the 1960s and ’70s.

Sudhanva Deshpande, a friend and comrade of the late revolutinary playwright Safdar Hashmi, has recounted Safdar’s extraordinary life and chilling death in his deeply humane biography – Halla Bol:The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi.

There's very little that's left unsaid about Tom Hanks the movie star, but not enough is spoken about his sparkling debut story collection – Uncommon Type.

With the Bengali New Year observed last week, it won't harm to change the tracks of this column a little and recommend a book in Bangla this week.

Tabish Khair's seventh novel explores bigotry as well as the multi-faceted nature of liberalism in the big city.

"The house is not essential for domestic abuse, but hell, it helps," Carmen Maria Machado writes about eighty-odd pages into In the Dream House, and the powerful grip that the book would have had around your throat until now tightens to a point of no return.

On the very first page of this stunning, pathbreaking graphic memoir, a father is reading a book to his child as the child is about to launch herself on his body with her arms stretched as a playful act. He keeps the book aside on the bed where he's lying and it's a copy of Anna Karenina. We know what Bechdel is trying to tell us right at the outset. Welcome to her unhappy family that you'll find was unhappy in its own devastating way.

This recommendation is unlike any before because this isn’t about a particular book, but two of her works – Happening and Simple Passion. It’s a great place to start if one were to be introduced to Ernaux’s vast body of work, most of which can be termed as autobiographical.

Arundhati Subramaniam marries the magical and the myriad, monsoon and Mumbai, myth and metaphors in nearly every page of this majestic collection of poems. Like every night has its own soundtrack, each piece here has a harmony unique to its own. And every time you return to them, it makes minute invisible readjustments to perfectly fit your state of mind.

One of the greatest joys of reading Naseeruddin Shah’s autobiography is that despite being one of the finest living actors in the world – to my mind, the finest ever – when he introduces the characters who feature in the book, he infuses those introductions with just unbridled warmth and admiration, and the occasional artistic envy.

Equal parts charming and eerie, most of the stories in the Ruskin Bond anthology titled A Season of Ghosts are delightfully entertaining.

Bear managed to shock readers and critics alike when it released in 1976, inviting both controversies and a cult following.

Sayaka Murata's characters start out as conventional people living ordinary lives like you and me. And then there appears a line, a turn of phrase, a fracture somewhere along the way, like a sudden curve on a mountain road that you on the driver's seat didn't anticipate, which sets you off on a freefall that often outlives the length of the book you're reading.