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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction has been announced – of the 16 books, seven are debuts. The books speak to fraught times – and also hold out hope — covering diverse themes including politics, science, history, art and more. On it are Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Hamish Hamilton), about the relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, and how she was both her “shelter and her storm”.
American journalist Barbara Demick’s Daughters of the Bamboo Grove (Granta) tells the story of twins separated at birth during China’s one-child policy and their different life trajectories, growing up in China and in the U.S. She puts international adoption under scrutiny as also the quality of life in the East and West.
Ece Temelkuran had to leave her country – Turkey – “to escape fascism, to be able to write, think and simply be.” In the summer of 2022, after six years of homelessness, she began to take stock of all that she had lost because she had to leave home. In Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century (Canongate), Temelkuran writes that “there is a sense of mourning in the air… mourning not for what we have already lost, but for what we know we eventually will.” All of us, she says, are searching for a new home,” for when basic human values don’t match up to the blunt cruelty of the new world order, “we become morally homeless.”
Kamila Shamsie found Lyce Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul (Hutchinson Heinemann) “ingenious”. In it, Doucet, who has reported from Afghanistan, draws attention to the past and present of the country and tells it through the journey of the luxurious Hotel Inter-Continental in Kabul, which opened its doors in 1969. It’s a history of Afghanistan told through the story of a hotel. Doucet focuses on the people who have kept it running, like Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper, or Abida, who became the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001.
“The books are rigorous and researched, lyrical and flowing. They are drawn together by the originality and skill with which they have been written. This reading list carries relevance and truth for the future as well as holding significant value for the present day – the books spark curiosity and demand attention; they are for everyone navigating the complicated and unpredictable world we are living in. The voices of these sixteen remarkable women need to be heard – loud and clear,” said Thangam Debbonaire, Chair of Judges.
Here are the other contenders: Jenny Evans’ Don’t Let It Break You, Honey: A Memoir About Saving Yourself (Hachette U.K.); Daisy Fancourt’s Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health (Penguin); Lady Hale’s With the Law on Our Side (Penguin); Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black (Oneworld); Judith Mackrell’s Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John (Picador); Deepa Paul’s Ask Me How It Works: Love in an Open Marriage (Viking); Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man (Jonathan Cape); Harriet Rix’s The Genius of Trees (Penguin); Jane Rogoyska’s Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War (Allen Lane); Zakia Sewell’s Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain (Hachette); Grace Spence’s To Exist as I am: A Doctor’s Notes on Recovery and Radical Acceptance (Profile Books); and Lea Ypi’s Indignity: A Life Reimagined (Penguin).
A shortlist of six will be announced on March 25, and the winner will be revealed on June 11, along with the winner of its sister prize, the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
In reviews, we read an anthology of love stories (in the time of caste), a writer’s personal tour of 21 cemeteries and books on Venezuela. We also talk to novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta about his new book.
Books of the week
In her debut non-fiction collection of essays, Somebody’s Walking On Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys, Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez takes readers along on personal tours of cemeteries. Translated by Megan McDowell, the essays showcase a sweeping breadth of this range, writes the reviewer Anushree Nande. “Cemeteries provide no dearth of stories and personalities — big and small, horrific and mundane, salacious and serene, haunted and mysterious, personal and communal”, and there are interesting tidbits from all over the world, including the Welsh colonies in the Andes and Argentine Patagonia. A lot of this wide-reaching appeal is down to how Enriquez blends reportage, memoir, travelogue, culture, literature, architecture, art, politics, and music, points out Nande.
Love in the Time of Caste (Zubaan Books), translated and edited by Nikhil Pandhi, challenges traditional ideas of romance through Dalit-feminist narratives. The anthology features the work of 17 writers, including Kusum Meghwal, Rajni Tilak and Kailash Wankhede. Pandhi, writes the reviewer Chintan Girish Modi, has written a sharp and moving introductory essay that explains his curatorial process, and situates the stories in a social, historical, political and literary context. “Each story is worth reading not only for its political import but also its literary merit. As a collection that unravels how emancipatory and unruly love can be, this book deserves to be read widely and not relegated to tokenistic discussions on Dalit writing at literature festivals.”
We focussed on a host of books to understand what is happening in Venezuela in our Bibliography column last week. Historian and journalist Suhit K. Sen, quoting writers, argues why Latin American underdevelopment should be seen as a structural byproduct of western development, of mainly Britain in the 17th to the early 20th centuries, and the U.S. from the 19th century onwards. The magnificent civilisations of the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas were razed as European ‘civilisation’ was transplanted in its place. In A History of Venezuela, Guillermo Morón recounts this history from an unabashedly Eurocentric perspective, lauding the theft of a country and a continent as a civilising mission in which well-intentioned priests and benevolent conquistadors brought the fruits of European enlightenment to savages stranded on the lowest rungs of the civilisational ladder. Eduardo Galeano makes up for this lack [of understanding Latin America] in his searing indictment of colonialism in Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. He is critical of Latin American leaders as well. “It is a rich history of peoples that takes readers on a journey from the barbarities of Francisco Pizarro, the illiterate pig-breeder who was given Spanish imperial licence to forage for empire, to the slick boardrooms in U.S. metropolises which provoked and financed coups and massacres every time a Latin American dispensation tried to forge a path to the development of its nations and peoples.”
Spotlight
In a wide-ranging interview, novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta explains to G. Sampath why nation-states are morphing into something new and what a post-nation future may look like. His new book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order (Penguin), is a fascinating historical and political analysis of the nation-state. “We are at a particular moment in the life cycle of the nation-state where it is changing into something new,” he notes. “In many countries, we’re confronting a different style of politics, a different set of motivations for politicians. What could be linking these different countries? What would it mean if we looked at the nation-state system as a single object rather than a bunch of discrete nations? What if the nation-state system is something with its own agendas independently of what national electorates want?” The book, says Dasgupta, is his attempt to answer these questions.
BrowserThe Digital Decades (Simon&Schuster) by Subimal Bhattacharjee is an account of India’s internet journey through distinct periods: from the first connections in August 1995 through the liberalisation era, the dot-com boom and bust, the mobile revolution, culminating in the Digital India vision under the Modi regime. Shamil Jeppi’s Writing Timbuktu (Princeton University Press) traces the history of books as a handwritten, handmade object in West Africa. Before printed books reached the region, between the 15th and 20th centuries, books were written and copied by hand. Jeppie centres his account in the historic city of Timbuktu and profiles the most important scholars and their works, the subjects they covered, and how the books were circulated, collected, and preserved. Discovery of New India (Penguin) is a graphic novel, written by Aakar Patel and illustrated by a political satirist who goes by the name PenPencilDraw. Dedicated to jailed student activist Umar Khalid and other political prisoners, it shines a light on the layered realities of modern India. Patmeena Sabit’s Good People (Virago) is the story of a family that flees to America during the Russian invasion of 1979. Though a work of fiction, it has several parallels with Sabit’s own life and experiences.
