24 books you can look forward to reading in 2024

3. The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster (William Collins): Time correspondent Simon Shuster, who has had access to the Ukrainian president over the course of the Russian invasion, writes about the actor-turned war hero, his life, motivations and the wartime leadership, from the dressing rooms of his variety show in Ukraine to the muddy trenches of his war with Russia. The Showman tracks the President’s evolution from a slapstick actor to a symbol of resilience, shining light on how he managed to rally the world’s democracies behind his cause.

4. What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom by Arash Azizi (Oneworld): In 2022, the killing of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, who was arrested for ‘flouting’ Iran’s strict religious dress codes, sparked a movement, with the battle cry, ‘Women, Life, Freedom.’ In the first major book on the new Iranian revolution, Azizi, a historian and the author of The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions, attempts to explain the movement that grew in the wake of her killing. The book will help you understand what is happening in Iran, who is protesting, and what they hope to achieve.

5. Shattered by Hanif Kureishi (Hamish Hamilton): On Boxing Day 2022, Kureishi had a fall in Rome, which left him paralyzed (he may not be able to walk or use a pen ever again). From a hospital bed, he constantly sent out updates on his health, through his blog, The Kureishi Chronicles, written with the help of his son, Carlo. In Shattered, he writes about what happened in the year that followed, alongside reflections from a life in writing, expanding the brutally honest material he has been sharing on Substack and X (Twitter).

6. Rosarita by Anita Desai (Picador): The first fiction in a decade by three times Booker-shortlisted author Anita Desai explores art, memory, and the power of the past. Set in Mexico in the present and India in the past, Rosarita has been described as “a beautiful, haunting novel that explores memory, grief, and things unspoken”. According to the publisher, “It is about mothers and marriage, about art and self-expression and the dark tug of familial and national violence, and about a young woman’s determination to forge her own identity.”

7. There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (Viking): The new novel by Elif Shafak, the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author of The Island of Missing Trees and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, is set between the 19th century and modern times. It revolves around ‘love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centered around a trio of characters living on the banks of the River Thames and the River Tigris – their lives all curiously touched by the epic poem of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia. They include Arthur, who is born in poverty in the London of 19th and whose only chance of escaping destitution, and an alcoholic father is his brilliant memory. A ten-year-old Yazhidi girl, Narin, in Turkey, runs against time after she is diagnosed (in 2014) with a rare disorder that threatens to make her blind. In 2018 London, Zaleekah, a hydrologist, who has been recently divorced, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband; it is here that a curious book about her homeland changes everything for her.

8. Great Flap Of 1942: How the British Raj Panicked Over a Japanese Non-Invasion by Mukund Padmanabhan (Penguin Random House): Mukund Padmanabhan's debut book tells the story of a period between December 1941 and mid-1942 when India lived in fear that Japan would launch a full-scale invasion. It led to a huge and largely unmapped exodus (of both Indians and Europeans) from both sides of the coastline to 'safer' inland regions. Situating the Japanese threat in a larger political context, the book dwells on the attack on Malaya, the conquest of Singapore, the bombing and eventual occupation of Burma, and the entry into the Indian Ocean to underline how it changed the face of both nationalist politics and British attitudes towards India.

9. James by Percival Everett (Penguin): The latest by one of America’s finest writers and Pulitzer Prize finalist reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; it tells the story from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his death to escape his violent father and recently returned to town. Thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

10. The Architecture of Modern Empire: Conversations with David Barsamian by Arundhati Roy (Penguin): As a novelist, Arundhati Roy is known for her lush language and intricate structure. As a political essayist, her prose is searching and fierce. All of these qualities shine through in the interviews collected in this volume by David Barsamian. She touches upon the US empire, Indian nationalism, resistance, a writer’s work, and much more. This newly reissued and expanded edition, featuring interviews from 2001 to 2022 and a moving foreword by Naomi Klein, explores Roy’s evolving political thought and commitments across the tumultuous twenty-first entry.

11. The Cobra’s Gaze: Exploring India's Wild Heritage by Stephen Alter (Aleph Book Company): Stephen Alter, the author of more than 20 books of fiction and non-fiction, ventures into India’s jungles to explore the wildlife, from king cobras and snow leopards to tigers and elephants. Much of Alter’s writing focuses on the Himalayan region, including his novel, Birdwatching (Aleph, 2022), Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth (Aleph, 2019), Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime (Aleph, 2014) and In The Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett (Aleph 2016). His most recent novel, Death in Shambles: A Hill Station, was published last year.

12. The Incarcerations: BK16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah (HarperCollins): In her explosive book on the Bhima Koregaon case, Alpa Shah pulls back the curtain on Indian democracy to tell the remarkable and chilling story of the Bhima Koregaon case, in which 16 human rights defenders (the BK-16) – professors, lawyers, journalists, poets – have been imprisoned, without credible evidence and without trial, as Maoist terrorists. She unravels how these alleged terrorists were charged with inciting violence at a year’s day commemoration in 2018, accused of waging a war against the Indian state and plotting to kill the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Expertly leading us through the case, Shah exposes some of the world’s most shocking revelations of cyber warfare research, which show not only the hacking of emails and mobile phones of the BK-16, but also the implantation of the electronic evidence that was used to incarcerate them.

13. The Hill Of Enchantment: The Story of My Life as a Writer by Ruskin Bond (Aleph): In a new memoir, to be published to mark his 90th birthday this year,  India’s beloved author will reflect on his journey, and the people he has met and formed a bond with. In an earlier compilation, Writer on the Hill, we were treated with a selection of fiction and non-fiction by Bond, whose stories fascinate readers of all age.

14. 2024: India in Free Fall by Sanjay Jha (HarperCollins): This book by the former spokesperson of the Congress Party offers a bold look at where we are as a country as the nation heads into the general elections this year. Jha argues that India appears to be in a state of free fall. Covering issues and subjects as potent as the othering of Muslim minorities, the bulldozing of citizens’ rights and homes, the dismantling of the judiciary, and the socio-economic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, he investigates the questions that must urgently be asked before India goes to the polls, yet again.

15. Until August by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Anne McLean (Viking): This rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a profound meditation on freedom, regret, self-transformation, and the mysteries of love. It’s the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, who has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios, and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart.

16. Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan (Penguin): In his latest novel, the follow-up to 2020’s Sex and Vanity, the bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians satirizes the English upper classes. He tells the story of a former Hong Kong supermodel, who pressures her son, the future Earl of Greshambury, to pursue a wealthy woman at his sister’s glamorous Hawaii wedding because the family is grappling with debt. An examination of love, money, murder, and sex, it takes us from the black sand beaches of Hawaii to the skies of Marrakech, from the glitzy bachelor pads of Los Angeles to the inner sanctums of England’s oldest family estates.

17. Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe by Sathnam Sanghera (Viking): Following in the footsteps of Sanghera’s bestselling book Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, Empireworld explores the ways in which British Empire has come to shape the modern world. He visits Barbados, where he uncovers how Caribbean nations are still struggling to emerge from the disadvantages sown by transatlantic slavery. He examines how large charities, like Save the Children and the World Bank--still see the world through the imperial eyes of their colonial founders, and how the political instability of nations, such as Nigeria, for instance, can be traced back to tensions seeded in their colonial foundations. And from the British Empire's role in the transportation of 12.5 million Africans during the Atlantic slave trade, to the 35 million Indians who died due to famine caused by British policy, the British Empire, as Sanghera reveals, was responsible for some of the largest demographic changes in human history.

18. The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota (Harvill Secker): This family mystery by Sunjeev Sahota, the author of three novels, including China Room, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, is a tragedy in the classic mould that traces one man’s seemingly inexorable fall. It is also a contemporary story of how a few words or a single action — to one person careless, to another, charged — can trigger a cascade of unimaginable consequences. An exploration of the mysteries of the heart, how community is forged and broken, and the shattering impact of secrets and assumptions alike, it is an important release from the author of Indian origin, who lives in London.

19. Choice by Neel Mukherjee (Penguin): In his latest novel, Mukherjee, brings together three interlinked stories to explore how free we are really to make our own choice. Mukherjee confronts our fundamental assumptions about economics, race, appropriation, and the tangled ethics of contemporary life. London-based publisher Ayush embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him: his practical economist husband; their twins; and even the authors he edits and publishes. One of those authors, a mysterious M. N. Opie, writes a story about a young academic involved in a car accident that causes her life to veer in an unexpected direction. Another author, an economist, describes how the gift of a cow to an impoverished family on the West Bengal-Bangladesh border sets them on a startling path to tragedy.

20. The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury): The latest book by the historian and the author of The City of Djinns and White Mughals turns his attention to the period from 200 BC to AD 1200, showcasing how Indian culture flourished alongside trade and economics and the region became the “intellectual and philosophical superpower of ancient Asia.” In his last book, The Anarchy, he recounted how the Mughal Empire — which dominated world trade and manufacturing and possessed almost unlimited resources — fell apart and was replaced by a multinational corporation answerable only to shareholders, most of whom had never even seen India and had no idea about the country whose wealth provided their dividends.

21. My Friends by Hisham Matar (Viking): Born in New York City to Libyan parents, Hisham Matar, the author of The Return, has spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his adult life in London. His latest, a meditation on displacement and the meaning of home, explores the friendship and exile between three Libyans. It shows how time tests — and frays — the bonds between friends and family members. It is shot through with the depth and beauty of Matar’s previous memoirs, In The Country of Men.

22. This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (Fleet): The latest novel by the acclaimed author of The Woman Upstairs tells the story of a family dispersed across the globe in the wake of the Second World War. It opens with the patriarch, naval attaché Gaston, while he is stationed in Greece as Paris falls to the Nazis. Gaston and his wife Lucienne’s myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children Inspired by her own story, Messud follows the Cassars from 1940 to 2010 in this complex, multi-generational saga.

23. Long Island by Colm Tóibín (Picador): The sequel to Colm Tóibín’s prize-winning, bestselling novel Brooklyn, the much-loved tale of emigration and alternative lives, published by 15 years ago, asks whether it is possible to truly return to the past and renew the great love that seemed gone forever. A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn, perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future. And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. A must-read from the master.

24. Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru (Scribner): Kunzru is the author of six novels. His latest is a portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind. A novel about beauty and power, capital, art, and those who devote their lives to creating it. Jay was set to be an artist. But as fate would have it, he is forced to live undocumented in the US. Having survived Covid, he lives out of his car, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. One day, he stumbles upon Alice, a former lover from his art school days, and the friend she left him for. Recognizing Jay’s dire circumstances, Alice invites him to stay on their property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting in motion a reckoning that has been decades in the making.

(Compiled by Nawaid Anjum)