Fiction of the Year
| Sometimes the "best books of the year" are the ones that made it to the bestseller lists; more often the best books of my year are the ones that pulled me back to them, that I never quite stopped reading. |
| It would take too much space to list all of them, but here is a list of some of the fiction and novels that made reading in 2006 such a pleasure. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman Haruki Murakami (published by Harvill Secker) |
| "I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird." Murakami has a passport to an alternate universe of weirdness. A man dreams obsessively of being eaten by cats. A woman marries an ice man. A flock of critic-like crows go insane in the face of good literature "" no wait, that's not weird, that's just realism. |
| Everyman Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape) A dead man unspools the memories of his own life "" the waste, the mistakes, the sad and the funny bits of it "" and finds redemption only in the distant realm of childhood. |
| There's a reason why Roth is called one of the greatest living writers of our time: it takes a genius to make his proposition work, and he makes it not just work but sing. Fireproof Raj Kamal Jha (Picador India) As Gujarat erupts in flames over the riots, a first-time father is handed his son "" an infant so savagely deformed that he looks mutilated. |
| In haunting, if occasionally over-written, prose, Raj Kamal Jha invokes the ghosts of those who died in the riots, the testimonies of those who were silenced, and the ordinary predicament of a man struggling to understand the needs of a baby unlike any other. |
| Inheritance of Loss Kiran Desai (Penguin India) Desai's second novel may have won the Booker Prize, but the real reason to read it is to discover for yourself that the author of the flimsy Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard has hit her stride. She pits immigrants in the US and India against the world of the self-assured inheritors of both countries. There may have been protests in Nepal against the portrayal of Nepalis in India, but they missed out on Desai's humour, warmth and affection for her characters. |
| Lisey's Story Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton) All writers know, and wince at, the inevitable question: "So where do you get your ideas from?" Stephen King knows the answer, and it's not pretty. |
| Lisey, the widow of a famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, must come to terms with her husband's secret and face the horrors that lurk in the depths, King hints, of every great creative mind. |
| After a series of blood-and-goo bestsellers that read like recycled pap from a third-rate little shop of horrors, this is a return to the kind of form King displayed in his iconic Dark Tower series. Lost Girls Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie (Top Shelf) Moore puts the graphic back into "graphic novel" with this controversial riff on three characters from children's classics. |
| Dorothy, Wendy and Alice are all grown up now, and discovering their erotic potential in a pre-World War Two era. Toto, we're so not in Kansas any more! Nyagrodha: The Ficus Chronicles Kalpish Ratna (Penguin India) Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed collaborate under this pseudonym; this modern-day retelling of stories from the Panchatantra is clever, addictive and so beautifully imagined that it brings the old stories alive for a new generation. Red Allan Sealy (Picador India) |
| Sealy, one of the most experimental of Indian writers, walks us through an abecedary that's a winding maze from A to Z, invoking Matisse's paintings as the patron saint of a complex tale of love, desire and impermeable borders. |
| The scaffolding of his story may often look shaky, but for anyone who loves art, Matisse or writing, this is a book to cherish. Sacred Games Vikram Chandra (Penguin, Viking) Sartaj Singh, the tough talking cop from the mean streets of Mumbai, is back, playing a key role in this noir morality tale that pits the policeman against Gaitonde, a don suffering from soul-weariness and a need to share his secrets with the right listener. Six Acres and a Third Fakir Mohan Senapati (Penguin India) Written from the perspective of the ordinary and the humble "" a horse, a common soldier, a villager "" this classic tale of greed, power and social comedy is still irresistible as it dismantles the myths of the simple life. Snake Catcher and other stories Naiyer Masud (Penguin India) Masud lives in a house called Abadistan, or "Abode of Stories", and for years a small band of the faithful have cherished his work, beginning with the haunting "Essence of Camphor". |
| The stories in Snake Catcher are disturbing, haunting, terrifying and always gripping "" it's as good an introduction to this unjustly neglected author as any. Suite Francaise Irene Nemirovsky (Knopf) Nemirovsky wrote this chilling account of wartime France months before she was captured by the Germans; she died in the concentration camps. The manuscript was discovered in the 1990s by her daughter, but the power of her vision has lasted the decades. Women in Cages Vilas Sarang (Penguin India) Sarang's dark, vitreous imagination came from the same world that nourished and poisoned a generation of Bombay's poets, and in this collection of short stories, his full range of talents are on display. |
| A Bombay prostitute sprouts vaginas like the eyes in a peacock's tail; a man gets into trouble on a cold winter's day when he absently warms his hands on a funeral pyre; lizards speak in tongues and Sarang slides across the barrier between fantasy and reality as though it doesn't exist. |