books i love

Our guest today has published a novel that beats with the pulse of here and now. Set in a world, a nation, that finds itself caught up in the many, many complexities of the digital age, that tussles still—as the cliché so suitably goes—with the old and the new. We access this moment through two young characters, Mayank and Nisha, located firmly in post-liberalisation India. Mayank, proud and loving patriot, burdened with a middling education, works as a content creator for a right-wing YouTube celebrity, while Nisha, driven to the big capital city from her hometown in the hills of Uttarakhand, plays salesperson in a posh store in a mall selling chocolates from Japan. It’s a new India, indeed, but who really is this New India for? Who is it serving? Who is it selling? And at what cost? "Mother India", Prayaag Akbar’s new book is scathing and tender, expansive and intimate, tragic and humourous, all at once. It brings to us, right to our doorstep, face to face, with a nation on fire.

Prayaag is also the author of "Leila", which won the Crossword Jury Prize and the Tata Lit Live! in 2018.He has worked as a journalist and editor with several leading publications and he is also Associate Professor of Literature at Krea University.

Vauhini Vara’s stories in “This is Salvaged” are wholly unexpected. They are unpretty stories featuring flawed, unpretty characters, marked by loss, grief, addiction. But there is humour here, and lightness too, moments of hope and connection and clarity. In "The Irates" a young woman struggles to deal with the death of her brother, in a most unexpected way. In "I Buffalo" an alcoholic tries to hide her addiction from her family but finds an unexpected bond with her young niece. In "The Hormone Hypothesis", two women bond over shared grief — as they both go through yet another biological shift. Through the fragments of the stories in "This is Salvaged" we are allowed a glimpse into ourselves.

Vauhini Vara is a writer — a journalist, editor, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and playwright, based in Colorado. Her debut novel, "The Immortal King Rao" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It won the Colorado Book Award and several literary prizes India in 2022.

Today’s guest is Sharmistha Mohanty whose every book I’m tempted to devote an episode to! Everything she has written, I’ve loved, and been inspired by. It was tricky to come up with a bio note for her, if only because some call her a poet, some a prose poet, others a fiction writer. She’s also done translation, and has recently created a poetry installation for the Kochi Biennale. It’s safe to say she wears many hats—or an all-embracing one, under which she quietly creates art. Sharmistha is the author of New Life, Five Movements in Praise, The Gods Came Afterwards, Extinctions, and Book One, her first book, first published in 1995, and revisited and republished now in 2024. She works away from plot and narrative, and instead holds up for us in "Book One" the landscapes of the self, the potency of gestures, the limitlessness of the world intersecting with small particularities. With every book, she pushes the boundaries of prose and poetry, arriving always at "new" forms.

Aanchal Malhotra is a Delhi-based writer and oral historian, author of "Remnants of a Separation", "In the Language of Remembering", and "The Book of Everlasting Things", her first novel that we’ll be discussing today. "The Book of Everlasting Things" tells a story both deeply intimate and widely encompassing of time, place, and history. It follows the lives of Samir, a Hindu perfumer, and Firdaus, a Muslim calligrapher, from when they meet as children in Lahore, in undivided India, fall in love, and then their journeys apart beyond Partition. Like most books I love, this one is ambitious, moving beyond the confines of national or regional boundaries out into the world, yet all the while paying loving attention to detail—to place and historical moment, to the art and rigour of perfumery and calligraphy, to the hope held out by love.

This is who we are, what we do, and what you might find on this podcast...lots of books, lots of questions to authors, and occasional interruptions from kitty, pigeons, and other animals.

On our first episode, we're joined by a very special guest. Someone I’ve long admired for her writing across genres, fantasy, journalistic non-fiction, columns, essays, Instagram posts, and now crime fiction. Nilanjana Roy is a writer who famously, as a child, ate books. Then she grew up though I suspect she still sneaks a nibble or two out of a page here and there.

She’s here to talk about her most recent novel "Black River"— "Black River" is set in and around the edges of Delhi, and though it’s framed as a fast-paced, gritty, grimy police procedural, it becomes so much more than that in its meditations on justice, on the natural world, on memory, family, and friendship.

Kiran Desai has called Black River “a riveting murder mystery, a psychological thrilled, a magnificent work of literary fiction…reading this novel is like holding a prayer in one’s hands.”

PS: Keep an ear out for some feathered friends who wish, quite insistently, to be a part of our conversation!