There are other well-known novelists in the Picador list who appear to be equally unenthused by the novel just now. For instance, neither of Amit Chaudhuri’s two new titles slated for this year is a novel. Real Time: Stories and A Verse Memoir slated for a June release, is just that: short stories set in Calcutta and Bombay with a meditative memoir in verse about his origins in Bombay. The other, In Parenthesis, due out in November this year, is a volume of essays.
But despite the doomsayers, publishers are declaring that 2002, like previous years, is once again the year of the novel. Raj Kamal Jha, undaunted by critics who panned his The Blue Bedspread, is daring them with his second novel in October. No, this one has nothing to do with bedlinen—it’s called If You Are Afraid of Heights. And keeping the flag flying is Rohinton Mistry, whose latest offering of Bombay life, Family Matters, will soon hit bookstores across the world. the story centres on a needy and cantankerous 79-year-old Parsi widower beset by Parkinson’s Disease, who is forced to go live with his daughter and her husband, severely testing the bonds of family affection.
