Experimenting with form and genre, these page-turners invite readers to join in on the fun
If last month’s stack was shadowed and gothic, this one is restless: full of games, tricks, and stories that test their own boundaries. A house that records its own secrets, a café where time pools strangely, an office break room turned into a survival stage. Murder, manners, folklore, even true crime — each book is playing with form, while daring the reader to play along.
Strange Houses | Uketsu, trs Jim Rion
(Pushkin; ₹699)
Uketsu has a knack to make the uncanny feel meticulous — floor plans sketched like case notes, and diagrams you linger over as if the walls might start whispering. He’s built a cult following in Japan by writing behind a papier-mâché mask and using visual horror as a part of his storytelling. That sensibility carries over here. The story coils slowly: a freelance writer called in to examine a “dead space” in a Tokyo home uncovers layers of family rot. It’s the kind of horror that stares back at you.
The Killer Question | Janice Hallett
(Hachette India, ₹799)
Hallett loves to hand her readers scraps of communication and dares them to solve the crime themselves. Here, it’s WhatsApp messages, emails, transcripts, and group chats, all orbiting a village pub quiz. A new team arrives, sweeps every round, and then a body turns up nearby — with ties to a long-buried kidnapping case. Hallett, once a magazine editor and screenwriter, turns chatter into theatre; the quiz banter is funny, the twists brutal, and the clues buried in plain sight.
Desi Crime | Aishwarya Singh, Aryaan Misra
(Pan Macmillan India; ₹350)
From the Burari mass suicide to the T-Series mob assassination and the Delhi “tandoor murder”, alongside cases of cults, cannibalism, and family betrayals, this book features 20 true-crime stories from across South Asia. It maintains the conspiratorial tone and sharp intimacy that made Singh and Misra’s Desi Crime Podcast a hit: you notice the forensic precision, the empathy under the narration, and the way the writers stitch together interviews and archival material. It’s like a whispered conversation in the dark, except every page is drawn from fact.
Break Room | Miye Lee, trs Sandy Joosun Lee
(Hachette India; ₹599)
This novella feels like sitting in on a reality show… except the set is your office and the prize is survival. Lee, who once worked in engineering, constructs the narrative with brisk pacing and sharp dialogue. The fun is in how ordinary office habits — coffee runs, side-glances, “team spirit” — turn monstrous under fluorescent lights. You laugh even as you squirm in your seat.
Days at the Torunka Café | Satoshi Yagisawa, trs Eric Ozawa
(HarperCollins India; ₹399)
This one feels like drifting through memory while sipping coffee. Author Yagisawa, who won the Chiyoda Literature Prize for his debut book Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, probes the quiet ordinariness that suddenly tips into the profound. Torunka Café doesn’t grant miracles; it simply gives space for memory to unfold, which might be its own kind of magic.
(A new column on popular fiction for the month.)
The writer is an independent journalist, editor, and literary curator.
