Political memoirs will continue to hog headlines. Among the biggies next year are Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s A View from the Outside: Why Good Economics Works For Everyone. Don’t hold your breath for the tittle-tattle, though—this is a collection of columns he wrote in the interim between his two stints as finance minister. More promising is Yashwant Sinha’s Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer—My Years as Finance Minister. This is billed as a memoir/commentary and is bound to have some juice. Economist Bimal Jalan also turns from economics to politics, scrutinising how our political system works in India’s Politics: A View from the Backbench, a follow-up to his earlier The Future of India. P.V. Narasimha Rao’s much-revised The Insider Part Two will be finally out. Despite the addition of a few chapters discovered by his son after his death, PV’s ringside view of prime ministership is to be published as an unfinished novel. Another ex-PM, I.K. Gujral, will be out with his memoirs without a protective coating of fiction, and there’s a biography of famous Budgetman and lawyer Nana Palkhivala.
Non-fiction continues to rule the roost with Sudhir Kakar’s collection of provocative essays on what makes a desi, The Indians: Portrait of a People. Other non-fiction launches next year include Gurcharan Das’ Nishkam Karma—On the Difficulty of Being Good and Patwant Singh’s The Second Partition. In fiction, we’ll have to wait a couple more years for the next Seth or Rushdie, but Hari Kunzru is back with My Revolution; so is David Davidar, this time with a more contemporary novel, despite its title: The Solitude of Emperors. But the really big ones are both pardesis: Dan Brown’s next book and one last round of Pottermania with the last of the series to be released in numerological fitness on 7/7/07.
