TL;DR

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.

Garth Greenwell's masterful debut novel has a first-person narrator who teaches literature at the American College of Sofia, much like the writer himself once did. Any reader who's aware of this will sense from the very beginning that the line between reality and fiction is blurry in the pages that follow.

Missing children, wandering spirits, dead babies, vengeful ghosts, battered and abandoned human beings inhabit the world of this book. Argentine journalist, novelist, and short story writer Mariana Enriquez is in no mood to please, protect, or pander her readers or give them what they may be expecting from her.

Drinking in the northern part of India, where I have spent the past decade of my life, is a national sport. You drink with friends and acquaintances at house parties, you drink with journalists you've met for the first time over heated debates at rundown bars, you absolutely must drink at weddings, and you drink both to celebrate and mourn. I was once invited to a funeral dinner where the good late sir's favourite alcoholic beverage was part of the menu.

In his New York Times review of the book Geoff Dyer wrote, "I'm guessing that the potential readership for 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running' is 70 percent Murakami nuts, 10 percent running enthusiasts and an overlapping 20 percent who will be on the brink of orgasm before they've even sprinted to the cash register."