Rukun Advani, who started Permanent Black after his unceremonious departure from Oxford University Press, is under the spell of Booker prize-winner J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. The novel is about a successful professor of English literature who is unexpectedly faced with a catastrophe that changes his life forever. Betrayed by his student lover and his colleagues, the professor seeks refuge in his daughter's farm, where she too is struck by a parallel disaster. The no-frills writing is at once "bitchy, pungent, sharp". "A stunningly good novel," says Rukun.
As literary advisor to Penguin India, Khushwant Singh's job is to read through countless manuscripts sifting the bad from the worse. Size has never deterred him, which is perhaps why he manfully completed the intimidatingly long Soul Mountain by this year's Nobel laureate Gao Xing Jian. His reward: Gao's novel was liberally interspersed with his two favourite subjects. For someone who always imagined Chinese women as flat-chested and frigid, the book was a "pleasant surprise". And inspiring: "Gao has the finest descriptions of sex and nature I've ever read."
