This was a fantastic year for fiction, with first-time authors and established names producing some dazzling works. It was difficult to pick our final Top 10, and as with any list, this too carries our own subjective biases. Despite this, our final selection yielded an incredibly brilliant and catholic list that dances between tragedy and mystery, satire, comedy and lyric realism with as much dexterity as the writers themselves.
The Sellout
By Paul Beatty
The unassuming author of The Sellout was catapulted to instant stardom when his novel won the 2016 Man Booker Prize. The book’s unnamed protagonist, “Me”, wants to reintroduce slavery and segregation in this savagely brilliant satire.
Small Town Sea
By Anees Salim
A 13-year-old boy records life in the small seaside town to which he has been transplanted by his dying father in this novel nominated for The Hindu Prize. With something of R.K. Narayan in the lovingly described details of small-town life, Salim’s tight, lyrical prose makes the story of the young boy all the more poignant.
Temporary People
By Deepak Unnikrishnan
The novel is set in the U.A.E., a “nation built by people who are eventually required to leave,” as the writer bitingly remarks. The structure of the book is dazzling, incorporating short stories, poems, and even a list of occupations. It won the 2017 Restless Books New Immigrant Writing award and is shortlisted for The Hindu Prize.
Leila
By Prayaag Akbar
Every kind of division — class, caste, religion — has been implemented in this futuristic city, and the overwhelming fear is that of contamination. The city at the centre of this debut novel, also in The Hindu Prize shortlist, is at once imagined and real: if the novel is dystopic, it also builds on our lived reality.
Exit West
By Mohsin Hamid
The Booker shortlisted novel begins as a regular boy-meet-girl love story and then explodes into chaos as militants attack the city the two inhabit. Thus they join the ranks of refugees roaming the world. While referencing the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, it is also a universal story of finding and losing love, and getting a bit of it back.
We That Are Young
By Preti Taneja
In this take on King Lear , the old king is replaced by Devraj Bapuji, the founder of a powerful Indian conglomerate. Time gets out of joint when he decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. Bollywood drama, machinations worthy of the Mahabharata , political commentary – Taneja’s debut novel has it all.
Story of a Brief Marriage
By Anuk Arudpragasam
A stunning debut, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, is about the pity of war and the poetry in the pity. It is set in Sri Lanka at the time of the civil war, in a single day and night in the life of a refugee and an unlikely relationship.
The Other Man
By Shashank Kela
Two alleged Maoists are shot down early in the novel. Then begins an investigation, which is fiction, literally and metaphorically. The portrait of a rapacious state as painted by Kela is chilling, especially as the lines between fact and fiction begin to dissolve in this hard-hitting novel.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
By Jesmyn Ward
This National Book Award finalist drips with darkness. Understandably so, since this is the history of America told through the story of an impoverished mixed-race family. The spectre of racial injustice haunts the pages, and two of the characters are actually haunted by ghosts from the family’s past.
Bheda
By Akhila Naik
Translated by Raj Kumar
The first Dalit work of fiction to come out of Orissa, it tells the story of Laltu with a stark clarity that could well make it a journalistic account. The ‘untouchable’ Dom boy must decide between accepting crumbs of comfort and fighting for justice, and he chooses the latter. With consequences.
