It was Annus Terrificus as far as books go—many of the Big League writers delivered their Big Books, some of them after gestations that lasted from seven to 13 years. But the elite band of novelists faced unusually stiff competition on their turf by a band of outsiders: top politicians who hogged the headlines for their memoirs. It was, as a Punjabi bookseller put it, a very "healthy" year—the healthiest, some say, possibly since Independence—with books in every conceivable genre including memoirs, short stories, inspirationals and how-tos flying off the shelves.
In the Line of Fire—A Memoir
Pervez Musharraf
The author is a very brave man, and we’re not talking about him holding "the world’s most dangerous job" as Pakistan’s president. He’s a shining example of a writer’s dedication, prepared to expose all (well, almost) the hanky-panky that goes on in holding Pakistan’s top job, scorning the caution and discretion that most politicians foolishly prize over a saleable memoir. And he was richly rewarded for his pains. His book hogged the headlines across the world, bringing home a lesson to all politicians: if it’s a choice between your memoirs and your job, choose the memoirs—that’s the only thing that’s hard to rig.
The Inheritance of Loss: A Novel
Kiran Desai
This novel about an orphaned girl plucked from a convent school at 13 to go live with her grandfather in Kalimpong is exactly the kind of novel that you’d pick up to while away a lazy evening—and abandon it the instant something more exciting came along. It seemed destined to go the way of hundreds of its ilk: too plain to dazzle the reader with its brilliance and too depressing to rate as popular chicklit. Then it won the Booker, and we had to genuflect before the Prize. It sold over 50,000 copies, pushing our little convent Miss into the league of the Big Boys.
Trees of Delhi—A Field Guide
Pradip Krishen
Who’d have ever thought a film director could teach himself to be a botanist? And who’d have dreamt his atlas on Delhi’s trees would spark a new trend of tree-spotting, turning his rather dry, if informative, book into a runaway bestseller? Certainly not his publishers, who started with a print run of 3,000 and found themselves in a spot when neo-tree enthusiasts couldn’t get hold of his book anywhere. This handsome, if somewhat unwieldy, field guide promises to be the new tree bible for both beginners and experts. Now, Krishen is planning an even more ambitious Trees of India.
Home
Manju Kapur
This is a high-brow take on Delhi’s unabashedly low-brow Karol Bagh. It’s a family saga in the genre Vikram Seth made famous with his A Suitable Boy, but shorn mercifully of all the indigestible bits about shoe-making and the intricacies of Lakhnavi tehzeeb. The good news is that this Commonwealth Writer’s Prize winner has gone back, after a disastrous fling with lesbian characters she knows little about, to doing what she’s best at. The bad news is that it appeals mostly to those who like saas-bahu soaps, reeking of the intrigues of a claustrophobic joint family.
In Spite of the Gods—The Strange Rise of Modern India
Edward Luce
The unblushingly flattering blurbs by Amartya Sen and William Dalrymple may have had something to do with it, but this scholarly title turned out to be the surprise bestseller of the year. Part of its charm is that, despite its patronising title and apparent scepticism, this is really a feelgood book about India (can we ever have enough?). And without the wearisome spiritual spin, too. It hits the right spot of our collective ego, whether it talks of our rising global power, the spectacular growth in our economy, or our vibrant democracy. The humour and entertaining anecdotes rescue the book from gathering mould in the libraries of the Planning Commission and the IIC.
A Call To Honour—In Service of Emergent India
Jaswant Singh
‘The Mystery of the Missing Mole’ would have been an apter title. The former bjp minister is now qualified to give lessons on how not to write a mystery thriller: the Mole he kept promising to unveil turned out to be a dud. But still, he deserves to go down in the annals of publishing history as a writer who can keep readers chained through 400 pages of archaic English about growing up in princely Rajasthan for an ending that never comes. It proves that you can make a reader into a sucker, not once, but 30,000 times, which is the figure his publisher claims of copies sold.
The Last Mughal—The Fall of a Dynasty. Delhi. 1857.
William Dalrymple
It’s clear right from the start of William Dalrymple’s latest blockbuster that he thinks few can write history like him. The galling thing is: he’s right. From the opening lines of Prince Jawan Bakht’s wedding procession leaving the Red Fort to the last breath of the exiled emperor, this former travel writer keeps us in thrall. He spins out a story of intrigue and gore, researched so meticulously that one wonders how he ever found the time to build up his impressive P3P profile. Undoubtedly, our Dan Brown of the Mughal era, although he’d rather be known as our next Romila Thapar.
Identity and Violence—The Illusion of Destiny
Amartya Sen
If you think the title is intimidating, you should try the blurbs: "A lucid and convincing critique of current trends in communitarian and culturalist thinking, underlining for us in a way that only a scholar of his background and learning can the complexity and multidimensionality of modern identity." Sure, but most of us may still need a dummies’ guide to figure out his guide to modern-day complexities. Don’t get fooled by the joke at customs he begins with or the Oscar Wilde quote: this is The Argumentative Indian at his abstruse best. Not for those who don’t use words like "multiculturalism" and "monolithic culture" at breakfast.
Sacred Games
Vikram Chandra
Why is it that writers who take too long to produce a book usually make up for it in size? Readers had fair warning when Vikram took seven years to write his new novel, and the door-stopper of a book that finally appeared this year proved their worst suspicions to be right. Sacred Games is 900 pages too long. The blurb promises that Sacred Games is a potboiling page-turner, but most time-challenged readers will have to take his publisher’s word for it. It requires good muscles—and a stomach for gore—to turn over the pages of this cops-and-gangsters novel. At least one of his worried publishers—the ones in Germany—broke this weighty tome into two, thereby saving the reader his wrist, if not his purse.
Ayodhya-6 December 1992
P V Narasimha Rao
The author, a former prime minister, wanted to wait until his death before this book exposing a watershed event in national politics was published, and now we know why: it doesn’t say one thing we didn’t know already about the Babri demolition. Unless you consider his long-winded justification for why he did what he did (not) do at the time as a revelation. All the questions about the demolition and after that he promised to answer with this book, he doesn’t. The book serves as a sad epitaph of his career as a prime minister: too little, too late.
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Year’s Biggest Surprises
A Life Less Ordinary by Baby Halder
The autobiography of a maidservant that had to become an international bestseller before it found readers at home
The Old Man and His God/Wise and Otherwise by Sudha Murthy
Plain tales of heroes in ordinary life that proved that even badly written stories about good people find a market
Code Name God by Mani Bhaumik
A rags-to-riches story about an eye surgeon that combines two winning elements: God and lucre
Remember These Anyone?
Red by I. Allan Sealy
The inner life of a painter portrayed by an ivory tower writer which didn’t find many takers
God’s Little Soldiers by Kiran Nagarkar
Even a starry launch with Aamir Khan couldn’t persuade readers to pick up this book crying out for merciless pruning
Weight Loss by Upamanyu Chatterjee
Fans of English, August waited in vain for a comic repeat and got this black book instead
How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life by Kaavya Vishwanathan
The book is long gone but the author will be a lasting moral lesson on what happens to ambitious teenaged writers who get caught cheating
