Orbital
By Samantha Harvey,
Vintage
This year’s winner of the Booker Prize is a rare addition to Anthropocene literature. It is resistant to doom and offers an undiluted appreciation of the world from the protagonists’ vantage point in space.

KAIROS
By Jenny Erpenbeck,
Granta
Jenny Erpenbeck fuses romance and elegy in her International Booker-winning novel, tracing the breakdown of a torrid relationship during the fall of the Berlin Wall.

James
By Percival Everett,
Mantle
A retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave who joins Huck on his journey down the Mississippi, James subverts and reclaims the original story in a myriad revealing ways.

Conversations with Aurangzeb: A Novel
By Charu Nivedita,
HarperCollins
The author challenges historical politics through ‘magic real’ conversations with Mughal emperors, primarily Aurangzeb, who wishes to correct the prevailing prejudicial historiographies of his character.

All the Little Bird-Hearts
By Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow,
Hachette
Unvarnished truths about how mother-daughter relationships are woven, shredded, and sometimes repaired form the core of this narrative.

Roman Stories
By Jhumpa Lahiri,
Hamish Hamilton
Reminiscent of the role of Ireland in James Joyce’s Dubliners, Rome exerts an inexorable pull on the characters in these short stories, emerging as a character in its own right.

THE KIDNAPPING OF MARK TWAIN
By Anuradha Kumar,
Speaking Tiger
A well-researched historical detective fiction that comments on societal corruption by reimagining Mark Twain’s stay in 19th-century Bombay.

The Vulnerables
By Sigrid Nunez,
Virago
A wryly charming yet poignant
musing on life, its uncertainties, and
the unlikely attachments people form to give it meaning and substance.

The Little Liar
By Mitch Albom,
Sphere
Truth and deception clash in this tale of the Holocaust, serving as a reminder of what war is capable of inflicting.

Lorenzo Searches for the meaning of Life
By Upamanyu Chatterjee,
Speaking Tiger
A departure from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s oeuvre, Lorenzo — the winner of this year’s JCB Prize for Literature — is a cleverly self-reflexive novel, intellectually rigorous, and wears its scholarship lightly.

THE HIVE AND THE HONEY: STORIES
By Paul Yoon,
Scribner
The richness of these seven stories can be attributed to their breaking away from privileged paradigms of storytelling and charting unexpected trajectories to explore shades of grief and ennui.

Nightbloom
By Peace Adzo Medie,
Oneworld
Reality is subjective and memories unforgiving in this novel about rebellion against society and oppressive family structures that scar the lives of women.

Gabriel García Márquez Getty Images

Until August
By Gabriel García Márquez,
Viking
Published posthumously by the author’s sons, Until August is an attempt by a once-brilliant mind to spin magic for one last time.

The Other Valley
By Scott Alexander Howard,
Atlantic
An intensely profound reflection on grief, time, fate, and free will that unfolds in the guise of a tender, coming-of-age love story.

Glass bottom
By Sonali Prasad,
Picador
This book revolves around broad themes such as the changing climate, the blurring of boundaries between man and nature, political agendas and capitalism.

Silken Gazelles
By Jokha Alharthi,
Simon & Schuster
A narrative about the search for love and tormented conscience while trying to hold onto loved ones.

WOEBEGONE’S WAREHOUSE OF WORDS
By Payal Kapadia,
Hachette
This dystopian, brilliant novella deals with censorship, fascism, coerced labour and inflation and is a refreshing and brave take on our times.

Fallen City: A Double Murder, Political Insanity, and Delhi’s Descent from Grace
By Sudeep Chakravarti,
Aleph
A chronicle of two deaths that unveils telling glimpses of a failed society, its guilt and its grief.

BLUE RUIN
By Hari Kunzru,
Simon & Schuster
A realistic picture of the art scene in Nineties’ Britain that investigates the stink of wealth and the division it creates among people.