The Hindu On Books newsletter: ‘Heart Lamp’ on Booker shortlist, remembering Mario Vargas Llosa, Dalit History Month books, and more

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The shortlist of the International Booker Prize 2025 was announced last week; Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp (And Other Stories), a collection of 12 short stories written between 1990 and 2023 about the everyday lives of Muslim women, and translated by Deepa Bhasthi, is among the six books on the list. It’s the first Kannada-language book to be shortlisted. Responding to the news, Ms. Mushtaq said she was elated to find Kannada stories on the shortlist. On this momentous occasion of her literary career, she recalled the days when her father, S.A. Rehaman, admitted her to a Kannada-medium school, which led her to a journey of discovery through the world of Kannada, which she says “is not just a language but a thinking process.” The other five books on the shortlist are Slow Boat (Small Axes) by Vincent Delecroix, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson, about a dangerous voyage a group of migrants attempt across the English Channel; Perfection (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes; Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume I (Faber), translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Granta Books), translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda; and A Leopard-Skin Hat (Lolli Editions) by Anne Serre, translated from the French by Mark Hutchison, inspired by the writer’s relationship with her sister. The jury, led by writer Max Porter (Grief is the Thing With Feathers) said the six books are about survival and self-preservation – about the indomitable instinct to keep going in the face of catastrophe, oppression, extinction or hopelessness. “In a world that can often seem full of despair, the shortlist celebrates the human spirit – our capacity to endure and our impulse to live a better life.” For the first time in the prize’s history, all the shortlisted books have been published by independent publishers; also four of them are under 200 pages long. 

The literary world has lost one of its stalwarts — Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa and 2010 Nobel literature passed away on Sunday. He was 89. He was a prolific writer and essayist with such celebrated novels as The Time of the Hero that drew on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy and angered the country’s military, and Feast of the Goat. His writing was celebrated as part of a new wave of Latin American literature, alongside Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Vargas Llosa came to be a fierce defender of personal and economic liberties, gradually edging away from his communism-linked past, and regularly attacked Latin American leftist leaders he viewed as dictators. Although an early supporter of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, he later grew disillusioned by Castro’s politics. In an infamous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa punched fellow Nobel Prize winner and ex-friend García Márquez, and as AP said in its obituary, it was never clear whether the fight was over politics or a personal dispute; neither writer ever discussed it publicly.

In reviews we read a long-lost memoir of hockey star and Adivasi stalwart Jaipal Singh, Annie Zaidi’s new novel, an anthology from the northeast and more. We peek into Siddhesh Gautam’s book recommendations for Dalit History Month. We also talk to bestselling author Harlan Coben on his back-to-back adaptations on OTT and more.

Books of the week

The Olympic winning hockey captain of the 1928 Amsterdam Games, Jaipal Singh, and a stalwart of the Adivasi movement organised several sporting events as a parliamentarian. In his memoir, Lo Bir Sendra: A Hunter in the Burning Forest (Navayana), Singh recalls setting up a cricket match for MPs. Jawaharlal Nehru, S. Radhakrishnan and a host of politicians took the field. The editors of the memoir note that it was written during a long sea voyage to Europe in 1969, a year before Singh’s death. It was first published by ‘Prabhat Khabar’ with a foreword by Stan Swamy, but soon went out of print. With its republication, a new generation of readers will learn of Singh’s life and times. Read an excerpt.

Annie Zaidi’s new novel, The Comeback (Aleph), is set in the worlds of film and theatre. The narrator of Zaidi’s novel is an actor who has changed his name from Jaun Kazim to John K. to gain wider acceptance, and lands a meaty role after years of auditioning in Mumbai. His acting skills were honed by his friend Asghar who led a theatre group. But when John tastes success, Asghar is working in a bank and loses his job when John gives an ill-judged interview about their past deeds. The friends lose touch, but years later John hears that Asghar is coming back to the stage. It is this fraught relationship that Zaidi explores. In his review, Sanjay Sipahimalani writes that The Comeback could well have restricted itself to an insular world in front of the arc lights, but Zaidi adroitly widens the lens to bring in other relationships.

I Am One Of You — Northeast India and the Struggle to Belong (HarperCollins) by Samrat Choudhury and Preeti Gill is a curated selection of essays from the region. For the reviewer Abdus Salam, the essays that shine a light on the role reversal within the Northeast haunt. “That’s perhaps because of the qualitative difference. While systemic and societal biases remain in India, the administrative machinery doesn’t lean towards the accused; however, nativist sentiments going beyond legitimate constitutional protections are often stoked by the powers that be in the eight States. For every ‘Chinky’, there’s a dkhar, vai, bohiragata or mayang — Khasi, Mizo, Assamese and Manipuri terms for the outsider. It’s terms Bengalis, the Muslims among them more in these changed times, and Gorkhas encounter across the region as an invisibilised presence.” The anthology, he writes, details the systemic and societal biases in the northeastern States.

April is Dalit History Month, and Siddhesh Gautam, mixed-media artist, designer and storyteller, is reading 10 books including B.R. Ambedkar’s Path to Salvation, Shailaja Paik’s The Vulgarity of Caste, Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants and the short stories of Bama. Writing about Ambedkar’s book, he says, “This sharp essay doesn’t just question religion, it questions the terms of our survival. It is one of the most important works of Ambedkar for the young generation. Once you walk through it, you know you’ll never bow again.”

Spotlight

Bestselling Novelist, writer, Executive Producer, Harlan Coben.

As we write this, there are three adaptations of Harlan Coben’s books on Netflix – Missing You, the Polish adaptation of Just One Look, and Caught, set in Argentina. Two more adaptations are in production, and he has also written a thriller with actor-producer Reese Witherspoon coming out in October. His latest book Nobody’s Fool has just been published by Penguin. Over a video call from New Jersey where he lives, the 63-year-old writer tells Mini Anthikad Chhibber how the collaboration with Witherspoon happened, and his writing process. Coben said he did most of the writing. “It was mostly about talking out the ideas with her. We created our own mixed voice. We email or text every day and talk about the book all the time. We both are obsessed with it.” Nobody’s Fool, writes Chhibber, is a case of the screen inspiring the book. It marks the second appearance of Detective Sami Kierce from Fool Me Once. Coben says Nobody’s Fool was inspired by the 2024 adaptation of Fool Me Once. Kierce was played by Adeel Akhtar who is one of Coben’s favourite actors and he wanted to work with him for a long time. “As I watched him, I thought, ‘this guy has got more stories to tell’.”

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• During Partition, Gandhi’s ideals of non-violence was put to a severe, tragic test. In Gandhi: The End of Non-Violence (Vintage), Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee puts Gandhi centre stage in significant political events including the Khilafat Movement and engages with important figures who played a role in the Hindu-Muslim question like Iqbal, the Arya Samajists, Ambedkar, Swami Vivekananda and V.D. Savarkar.

• Another Day in Landour (HarperCollins) is Ruskin Bond’s latest offering. Bond who has kept a journal through the years but never on a regular basis says “there’s no fiction” in his new book. “Seventy years after celebrating my room on the roof [The Room on the Roof] in Dehradun, I am now celebrating the window of my small bedroom-cum-study in Landour, Mussoorie.” He has slept beside this window since 1980. “I can always find something to write about, and the window is my collaborator.”

• With his new novel set in New Delhi, Keshava Guha says he has attempted to make “an inquiry into the anti-feminist backlash among men of my generation.” The Tiger’s Share (John Murray India) is the story of two ambitious women set against a dystopian background of ecological collapse and political unrest.

• Bhavika Govil’s Hot Water (Fourth Estate India) is a coming-of-age tale centred on a single mother and her two young children and explores themes of desire and identity. A portion of this debut novel won the inaugural Pontas & JJ Bola Emerging Writers Prize in 2021.