The Hindu On Books newsletter: Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, Banu Mushtaq’s Booker nomination and more

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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. On the 30th anniversary of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 16 books have been picked on the longlist announced on March 4 which includes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s comeback novel, Dream Count, Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything, which brings together characters from her Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge books, Miranda July’s All Fours, debutant Roisin O’ Donnell’s Nesting, about domestic abuse and what happens when the protagonist flees the situation, Karen Jennings’ Crooked Seeds, set in South Africa, Amma by Saraid de Silva, Good Girl by Aria Aber, a story from Berlin’s underground, The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji and last year’s Booker Prize-shortlisted The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden. Kit de Waal, chair of the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction judging panel, said the longlist highlights some of the best writing by women all across the world this year. The shortlist will be announced on April 2, and the winner on June 12.

In the International Booker Prize longlist announced last week, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp (Penguin), a collection of stories on everyday lives of Muslims translated into English from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, was one of the 13 chosen out of more than 150 books. “It is an honour for Kannada that a work written in our language is getting this recognition,” said Mushtaq, the Hassan-based writer, advocate and activist. The stories were written between 1990 and 2023. The jury, in its comment on the collection, stated, “Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the off-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style.”

 In a victory for independent publishers, a majority of the books are represented by smaller houses. Also on the longlist are Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance (Syracuse UP), translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon, and Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter (Deep Vellum). Here’s the full list. The International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist of six books will be announced on April 8. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern on May 20.

In reviews we read about the rise of Hindu nationalism in south India, a journalist’s travels in Cuba, and talk to Ramjee Chandran about his new novel.

Books of the week

A case study of Kerala shows how the last frontier of Hindutva is being breached in the south. A new book, Hindu Nationalism in South India (Routledge), edited by Nissim Mannathukkaren, examines the rise of Hindutva in relation to the State’s history, caste, culture, post-truth, ideology, gender, politics and the Indian national space. Several writers, including several other writers including Christophe Jaffrelot, T.T. Sreekumar, Anil M. Varughese, J. Devika map the tectonic shifts taking place on the ground despite the lack of comparable electoral success. In his review, Ziya Us Salam writes that a socio-cultural change is taking hold, and Jaffrelot points that out in his essay: “It happens through a couple of processes: firstly, the denigration of secularism, religious figures wielding state power, new laws targeting conversion, a ban on beef, the Hinduisation of street/city names, the rewriting of textbooks, etc., which give legitimacy to Hindu nationalism, and secondly, the previously-covert-but-now-visible forms of discrimination against religious minorities.”

Journalist writer Ullekh N.P.’s Mad About Cuba: A Malayali Revisits the Revolution (Penguin) intersperses the wide-eyed traveller’s account with history and contemporary politics, and voices from the ground that reveal the contradictions in Cuban society. In his review, S.R. Praveen writes that the book offers a nuanced take on the stories of victimisation propagated by Cuban exiles in Miami. “Ullekh closely examines their role in violent attacks, from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 to the terror strike on a Cuban flight in 1976 which killed 73 people. In the end, what shines through in his account is the resilience and fighting spirit of the Cuban people, exemplified in the rapid strides made by the Cuban biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.” At every other turn in Cuba, Ullekh notices many similarities to Kerala, where the first Communist government was democratically elected to power in 1957, just two years before Communist revolutionaries seized power in Cuba by overthrowing Fulgencio Batista’s band of elites amply supported by the U.S.

Malli Gandhi, in his new book, Tribes of South India (Manohar), lays down some of the regional and development issues that the communities face. Several Adivasi communities such as the Andh, Bagata, Banjara, Bhil, Gond, Kolam, Dulia, Rona, Savara, Sugali, Yerukula, live across south India, in Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. “Tribal communities are not a homogeneous group,” Gandhi writes in the preface, and maintain exclusive identities.Their needs are diverse and different, so a one-size-fits-all approach does not work. The question that haunts these marginalised communities is whether and how to modernise and at what cost. In his new book, The Totos (Hawakal Publishers), independent researcher and writer on tribal affairs in West Bengal Krishnopriyo Bhattacharya examines the predicament of this tribe which lives in the extreme north of West Bengal, on the border with Bhutan. The Totos are among the 67 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTG) of India. Bengal, says Bhattacharya, has two other PVTGs, the Lodhas and Birhors. What he observed during his fieldwork is that the Totos — who actually call themselves Tot-bee — are moving towards “rapid detribalisation” and he tries to explain the reasons why.

Spotlight

Bengaluru-based journalist and podcast host Ramjee Chandran’s debut novel For No Reason at All (Penguin Random House) is based on true events around the silicon metal controversy of the 1980s. Politics, power play, lobbying, skullduggery, espionage and the hubris of a bureaucratic overlord, combine to create a quandary for the Indian prime minister and his advisers. In an interview with Stanley Carvalho, Chandran says had the Mettur silicon project moved ahead without getting sucked into politics and bureaucratic power plays, India would have been 30 years ahead of the rest of the world in the use of silicon in photovoltaics. “We would have been leaders in electric vehicles and ahead on so many applications,” he points out. Asked whether writers should be responsive to contemporary happenings in society and write about them even as fictional stories, Chandran said: “It is stupendously important to be able to tell these kinds of stories because one way or the other, it is part of our heritage, business heritage, if you like.”

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• Tareekh Pe Justice: Reforms for India’s District Courts by Prashant Reddy T. And Chitrakshi Jain (Simon&Schuster) looks into the dysfuntional working of the district judiciary. It’s the first point of contact for most Indians seeking justice and the writers argue why a rethink is necessary so that people are served better.

• In Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves (Princeton University Press), Jaap de Roode tells the story of how animals use medicine and what it can teach human beings about healing. There are apes that swallow leaves to dislodge worms, sparrows that use cigarette butts to repel parasites, and bees that incorporate sticky resin into their hives to combat pathogens. De Roode argues that humans need to apply the lessons from medicating animals.

• Rakhshanda Jalil has edited a book of stories on Delhi, Basti & Durbar (Speaking Tiger). The collection brings together a wide variety of stories about the capital city, on the lives of the rich and powerful, the middle classes and the poor, and gives the reader a sense of the history of Delhi from 1857 to the present.

• The Rabbit in the Moon: Two Tales from the Panchatantra (Aleph) by Meena Arora Nayak is the story of a clever rabbit Lambakarna who must find a way to protect his flock from a herd of wild elephants, and that of a louse and a bedbug who want a taste of the king’s blood but each has a different plan to get there. With illustrations, this book is an introduction to the world of the Panchatantra, for young and old readers.