What if you could step directly into the world of a novel? This year’s most compelling fiction offers that very portal—from the shadowy intrigue of wartime Calcutta to the gritty carriages of the Indian Railways, from the cloistered halls of dark academia to the rain-drenched hills of Malnad. Each of these selections opens a distinct window onto lives and landscapes that challenge, transport, and transform. Enjoy!
Great Eastern Hotel
By Ruchir Joshi
Fourth Estate
Books rarely live up to the expectations created by blurbs. This is a rare one that does. Described as “A WW2 Epic of Jazz, Spies & Revolution in Colonial Calcutta”, Ruchir Joshi’s novel is all this and more. Beginning in August 1941, it fans out like the Ganga in Bengal to encompass in its breadth both the great events of history and the smaller lives of people caught in the churn.
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The Comeback
By Annie Zaidi
Aleph Book Company
Foregrounding the small-town experience, The Comeback is an authentic exploration of the struggles of an actor’s life. It deglamorises theatre, showing its false hierarchies, its crippling dependence on funds, and the eventual fatigue with uncertainty that besets all its practitioners. But above all, it is a celebration of the resuscitating powers of art.
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Silk Route
By Sachin Kundalkar, translated by Aakash Karkare
Penguin Random House
Marathi author Sachin Kundalkar, author of the much acclaimed Cobalt Blue, delivers another masterful novel with Silk Route. The reader is taken along with Nishikant on his journey through Indian cities in his search for his partner, Sreenivas. The way Kundalkar writes it, queer love becomes an everyday matter, and therein lies a lesson for our homophobic world.
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Rising Sons
By Kavery Nambisan
Penguin Random House
A novel rooted in Kannada history and landscape, this is the family saga of Devanna. The fate of a village near Mysuru becomes emblematic of the story of the fledgling nation. Kavery Nambisan, a surgeon by profession, dissects the relationships between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, the old and the young, and the past and the present with the precision that distinguishes her vocation.
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Katabasis
By R.F. Kuang
HarperVoyager
The dark academia novel delivers the message that life is better, more varied, and more deserving of attention than the stultifying academia. But to gain that knowledge, the protagonist—a Cambridge student called Alice—has to first travel to the underworld, like the Greek heroes of yore. Full of literary references, the novel is also a puzzle meant to be solved by joining the dots.
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Railsong
By Rahul Bhattacharya
Bloomsbury India
Landing on the scene at the fag end of 2025, Railsong has fast become the talk of the town. The story is powered by the gigantic mechanism of the Indian Railways and by the intransigence of one fiery girl called Charu, who is easily one of the most exceptional heroines of Indian English literature. With a well-read mind that isolates her from her surroundings, Charu learns how to thrive by adopting the art of leaving.
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Bride in the Hills
By Kuvempu, translated by Vanamala Viswanatha
India Penguin Modern Classics
Kuvempu’s Kannada classic presents an interiorised landscape through which all the characters trudge along to arrive at the oracular truth of the novel’s epigraph: “Here, no one is important; No one is unimportant; Nothing is insignificant!” Set in the forest-clad, rain-drenched hills of Malnad in the Western Ghats, the novel also freezes in time a fast disappearing world.
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Endling
By Maria Reva
Virago
The 2025 Booker longlisted novel has been categorised variously as a “war story”, “absurdist fiction”, “political fiction” and “eco-fiction”. None of the labels quite captures what this remarkably witty and poignant novel is all about. Endling constantly shapeshifts to ultimately point at the failure of language, and of the novelistic genre by extension, to speak of the unspeakable realities of our times.
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Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
By Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
India Penguin
Winner of the Booker International Prize 2025, Heart Lamp firmly centres the Muslim woman’s experience in India. What the stories reveal is rarely flattering: reading them we know why Banu Mushtaq has been vilified by Hindu and Muslim conservatives alike. The stories are at once moving and excoriating.
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The World with its Mouth Open
By Zahid Rafiq
India Hamish Hamilton
The 11 stories open up a Kashmir beyond the disturbance that has come to define it. Life flows freely in the bazaars and alleys of Srinagar till the cracks open up, plunging the people into the abyss. The characters are like any of us in their daily joys and sorrows and also unlike any of us in having experienced the darkest horrors at the most unexpected corners.