The Hindu On Books newsletter: Kiran Desai on Booker longlist, Kuvempu in English, ‘The Lion of Naushera' and more

The Hindu

20 hours ago

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The Booker Prize longlist for 2025 is out and past winner Kiran Desai is back on it 19 years later for her new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Penguin). The judges, led by Roddy Doyle, called the novel about a pair of young Indians in America 'vast and immersive', which enfolds a 'magical realist fable within a social novel within a love story.'
Booker's dozen
The Booker's dozen or 13 longlisted novels, include two debutants, Albanian-American writer and playwright Ledia Xhoga (Misinterpretation/Daunt Books) and Ukrainian-Canadian writer Maria Reva (Endling/Virago), and five British authors.
Other writers on the longlist are Katie Kitamura for Audition (Fern Press), Tash Aw for The South (4th Estate), Natasha Brown for Universality (Faber), Claire Adam for Love Forms (Faber), Jonathan Buckley for One Boat (Fitzcarraldo Editions), Susan Choi for Flashlight (Jonathan Cape), Ben Markovits for The Rest of Our Lives (Faber), Andrew Miller for The Land in Winter (Sceptre), David Szalay for Flesh (Jonathan Cape) and Benjamin Wood for Seascraper (Viking).
The shortlist will be announced on September 23, and the winner on November 10.
In reviews, we read an excerpt from The Lion of Naushera, Kuvempu's magnum opus in English, Joan Didion's posthumous book and more.
Books of the week
Legendary Kannada writer Kuvempu's 1967 novel, Malegalalli Madumagalu, an exemplary work of social realism, has been recently translated into English (Bride in the Hills/Penguin Modern Classics) by Vanamala Viswanatha. In 2020, K.M. Srinivasa Gowda and G.K. Srikanta Murthy also translated it into English (Bride in the Rainy Mountains).
Set in the late 19th-century Western Ghats, a region of dense forests teeming with animals, birds, and diverse communities, Bride in the Hills, writes N.S. Gundur in his review, explores the lives of ordinary folks 'far away from the grand mainstream of the historical flow of civilisation'. However, colonial modernity later enters this lifeworld with a bicycle, Christian missionaries and schools.
'Of all the portraits in the novel, it is the subaltern characters — Gutthi, Aita, Pinchalu, Akkani and Pijina — who win our hearts in tune with the novel's epigraph: 'No one is unimportant/Nothing is insignificant',' says Gundur.
Brigadier Mohammed Usman was touching 36 when he led a contingent to wrest two strategic locations in Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan in 1948. Given a choice to move to Pakistan after Partition, he chose India. Brigadier Usman died in combat, and was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra posthumously for his valour. Read an extract from a new book, The Lion of Naushera (Bloomsbury) by Ziya Us Salam and Anand Mishra.
After Joan Didion passed away in 2021, summaries of sessions with a psychiatrist were found in her desk addressed to her husband John Gregory Dunne. Didion's Notes to John (HarperCollins), published posthumously, raises several questions, not least should such notes have been published? and b) what is the quality of the book itself? In a piece, Suresh Menon goes into questions of ethics and aesthetics, and says that 'there are no easy answers; you react to [a] book on feel and emotion.'
Spotlight
As part of The Hindu's Out of Print series with writers, Sahitya Akademi award-winning Tamil writer Imayam was in conversation with Justice (retired) Prabha Sridevan, former judge of the Madras High Court, at The Hindu office in Chennai recently. Sridevan has translated three of his books into English. The task of a writer is to create, while the translator, in turn, breathes new life into it through another language, Imayam said.
He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2021. His debut novel, Koveru Kazhudhaigal (Beasts of Burden), was published in 1994. When Imayam, the nom de plume of V. Annamalai, bagged the Sahitya Akademi award, historian and writer A.R. Venkatachalapathy wrote that the writer from the south Arcot region of Tamil Nadu had kept to his commitment of writing on what he believes in.
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