• Caged Tiger (Bloomsbury) by Subhashish Bhadra traces the story of India’s institutions, identifying reasons why they sometimes fail and what civilians may do about it. He argues that the Indian state often hinders rather than help the people it is meant to serve. “If India is to take its rightful place as a global powerhouse, we need all billion plus Indians free in every sense of the word,” he writes in the introduction.
  • Vinod Thomas’ Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change (Palgrave Macmillan) presents insights on the interaction between risking risks and raising the bar for resilience to the climate crisis. Its timeliness lies in applying important findings on risk and resilience to runaway climate change. To give just one example, the first key message is that there has to be accounting for the root causes of climate calamities and not just their symptoms.
  • The everyday ordinary takes an extraordinary turn in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Book of Rahim & Other Poems (Westland). In it, he inhabits the voice and time of Ghalib; he revisits Abdul-Rahim-Khan-i-Khanan from the times of Akbar and Jahangir; and discovers anew his family home in Lahore.
  • The story of The Return of Faraz Ali (Tranquebar) by Aamina Ahmed begins in pre-Partition India. A young boy is plucked from his home in Lahore at the directions of his powerful father. Years later, Faraz Ali is sent back to Shahi Molla’s labyrinthine alleys as an inspector tasked with covering up a violent death. Will he be able to follow orders? Writer Yaa Gyasi found it a rich and deeply moving novel about confronting both personal and political memories.