The Reading List by Bahrisons Booksellers

What do you do when the life you thought you understood suddenly stops making sense?

In The First House, Avni Doshi weaves together marriage, motherhood, astrology, a Greek goddess, and the search for meaning when life begins to unravel.

For the Season 2 finale of The Reading List, we sit down with the Booker-nominated author to talk about the stories we tell ourselves, the patterns we inherit, and the things we turn to when certainty disappears.

It’s a conversation about starting over, without necessarily leaving everything behind.

What brings thousands of people to Daryaganj every Sunday in search of books?

In this episode of The Reading List, Kanupriya Dhingra joins us to talk about The Sunday Book Bazaar, the history of the market, the craft of bookselling, and the readers who return week after week.

What happens when a natural bazaar is compelled to move into a more regulated space? And who gets to belong in a changing city?

A conversation about books, reading, community, and the people who keep a city’s reading culture alive.

Getting an H-1B visa can feel like winning the lottery. But what happens once you have it?

In this episode of The Reading List, journalist and author Tanul Thakur joins us to talk about Wild Wild East and the complicated reality behind one of America's most coveted visas. We talk about the hopes that bring Indian workers and students to the US, the complex web of intermediaries built around the H-1B visa, and what happens when the promise of opportunity doesn't quite match the reality.

There’s another side to this story: American workers, the changing nature of work, and the growing inequalities within the tech industry.

It's a conversation about ambition, migration, and the price of chasing a better life.

What really happened in the twenty-one days leading up to India's Independence?

In this episode of The Reading List, Josy Joseph takes us into the world of his new book, Birth of a Nation, where the future of India was still being negotiated and contested. We explore the complicated world of the princely states and the many political forces trying to influence their decisions.

But this is also a story about the people who worked to bring the Republic into being, many of whom have since faded from our collective memory. We talk about why these forgotten stories matter, and what they can still teach us about the country we live in today.

History remembers poets. But what happens to the women history leaves behind?

In this episode of The Reading List, we sit down with Tarana Husain Khan to discuss her latest novel, The Courtesan, Her Lover and I, inspired by the real-life story of Urdu poet Dagh Dehlvi and the courtesan, artist, and poet Munni Bai Hijab.

We explore how Hijab has been remembered, the silences that still surround her life, the care it takes to reconstruct someone whose story survives only in fragments, and the delicate balance between history and fiction.

This is a conversation about love, memory, storytelling, and what it means to write someone back into history.

Every family has its own history, contradictions, and power dynamics.

This week on The Reading List, we're joined by Karan Mahajan to discuss his new novel, The Complex, set against the backdrop of a changing India. Together, we explore the beautiful and messy reality of large Indian families, the lasting legacy of Partition, and the expectations placed on daughters and daughters-in-law. We also discuss the gap between the promise of the American Dream and the reality many migrants experience, and why the idea of home continues to shape us across generations.

Whether you've grown up in a joint family or not, this conversation offers a thoughtful look at memory, belonging, and the enduring ties that bind. How much of who we become is shaped by the family we inherit?

BRB. Gone reading ️

The Reading List is taking a short summer break and returns on July 1st.

Need a fix until then? Catch up on all 18 episodes of TRL. 

See you in July!

#TheReadingListByBahrisons #ReadWithBahri #BookPodcast #IndianAuthors IndieBooks

Do you ever stop to notice the birds, trees, and animal life around you?

In this episode of The Reading List, Neha Sinha joins us to discuss her new book Wild Capital and the hidden ecological life of Delhi. From childhood memories of growing up in the city to her environmental work across biodiversity parks in Delhi, Neha reflects on what it means to truly pay attention to the natural world around us.

We talk about disappearing bird and plant life, urban conservation, and the surprising ways nature continues to survive within one of India’s largest cities.

This conversation is an invitation to slow down, observe more closely, and see Delhi differently.

WILD CAPITAL is releasing as MY WILD CITY in the US and UK in September 2026.

Breakfast is often seen as the simplest meal of the day, but it carries stories of memory, migration, labour, and identity.

In this episode of The Reading List, Priyadarshini Chatterjee joins us to discuss her debut book, First Bite, where she travels across ten Indian cities to explore the cultural and historical significance of the morning meal.

From street-side staples to deeply local traditions, we talk about how ecology and migration shape what cities eat, how work and daily rhythms influence the first meal, and how breakfast quietly challenges the idea of India as a predominantly vegetarian country.

How does one build a life within a system that never stops moving?

This week on The Reading List, Rahul Bhattacharya joins us to talk about Railsong, a novel that traces the life of Charu within the vast world of the Indian Railways.

Through the world of Railsong, we explore Rahul’s writing practice, the origins of the book, and the making of Charu, a character shaped by observation, movement, and change. He also speaks about his enduring fascination with the Indian Railways, and how the novel captures a world that feels shared, yet remains deeply divided.

A conversation about systems, stories, and the lives that move through them.