Published: December 29, 2018 12:25:49 am
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Next year: new books by Amitav Ghosh, HM Naqvi and Toni Morrison
If you have been promising yourself to give up the dopamine thirst of smartphone pings and become a better reader, there is plenty lined up in 2019 to help you stick to that resolution.
Amitav Ghosh has dropped anchor and returned to fiction, after sailing all across the world on the Ibis. Gun Island (Hamish Hamilton) is the story of a Brooklyn-based dealer of rare books who finds himself drawn to an ancient legend about the snake-goddess, Manasa Devi. Ghosh also returns to Sunderbans in this tale that promises to reprise his old and new interests — the distinctive lives of watery worlds and the relentless march of climate change.
Upamanyu Chatterjee, Cyrus Mistry and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni are among other Indian writers in English with books up for release. The Assassination of Indira Gandhi (Speaking Tiger) is Chatterjee’s first collection of short stories, written over three decades, from the 1980s to the present. Mistry tells the story of Pastor Pius Philipose, a charismatic priest in a small town in Kerala in his new novel, The Prospect of Miracles (Aleph). Divakaruni’s The Forest of Enchantments (Harper) is among a host of new attempts to tell the Ramayana in Sita’s voice.
HM Naqvi’s 2009 book Home Boy established him as one of the most exciting fictional voices from across the border. He returns with a much-awaited second novel, The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack (HarperCollins), about a defeated chronicler of “Currachee”, who finds a new reason to carry on.
One of the first big books of the year is Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf(Penguin), the first instalment of a fantasy trilogy that is being billed as an African Game of Thrones — Neil Gaiman, among others, has drummed up the expectations with comparisons to Tolkien. The Jamaican writer won the ManBooker in 2014 for A Brief History of Seven Killings.
Four decades of Toni Morrison’s writing are distilled in a collection of essays, speeches and meditations — A Mouth Full of Blood (Penguin). This is an examination of questions of race, gender and American politics by a feminist writer whose voice needs to be heard more than ever today.
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