Equally long in the making (seven years) is Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, a thriller with literary ambitions about Mumbai’s underworld, filmdom and people. It is slated to be out in August. But the year’s biggest launch is likely to be William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal in October.
Upamanyu Chatterjee is also coming out of a long hibernation with his fourth novel, Weight Loss, in January. Rumour has it that he’s in his old form in a tale of black humour of a man who lusts after his teachers, eunuchs, vegetable vendors, landladies... And remember the hullabaloo about Kiran Desai? She’ll be out with her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, in February. Manju Kapur will be out with her third, Home—a tale of cruel and crippling family life in Delhi’s middle-class Karol Bagh.
New stars will enter the literary firmament, courtesy their six-figure advances. Thrity Umrigar is no debutante, having already two novels—Bombay Time and First Darling of the Morning—under her belt. But it’s her third, The Space Between, that’s likely to earn her a lasting place among the P3P when it’s launched in January. HarperCollins has bought worldwide rights for a six-figure dollar advance. Another name to watch out for is Shivani Singh, whose debut novel The Raja Is Dead has been snatched up by publishers in UK, France, Italy and Canada. But the biggest surprise of the year will probably be M.J. Akbar who has written a memoir/novel to come out in March. As tell-alls go, 2006 has its share: from Ambedkar’s love letters to I.K. Gujral’s expose and Kuldip Nayar’s Scoops to General V.P. Malik’s Kargil War.
Finally, the one-man industry, Khushwant Singh: OUP will be out with an illustrated coffeetabler of History of Sikhs in January; Roli with an illustrated Train to Pakistan in March, and Penguin with his translation of Urdu poetry in February.
