This year has a lot in store for booklovers — be it works by P Chidambaram, Omar Abdullah and Sheila Dikshit; biographies of Gauri Lankesh and Mohan Bhagwat; collected works of Manmohan Singh; VS Naipaul’s essays on India or novels by Tabish Khair and KR Meera.
Autobiographies and biographies, however, seem to be the flavour of the season with scores of these being lined up for publishing.
While Rupa will publish memoirs by Montek Singh Ahluwalia besides biographies of Priyanka Chopra (Aseem Chhabra), Danny Denzongpa (by Priyanka Pereira) and Mohan Bhagwat (by Kingshuk Nag), Bloomsbury will bring out autobiographies of Sheila Dikshit and Yaswant Sinha besides a biography of Chandrababu Naidu (by Tejaswini Pagadala).
Among the other biographies are those of Syama Prasad Mookerjee by Tathagata Roy and Mahendra Singh Dhoni by Bharat Sundaresan (both Penguin); Indira Gandhi, Gauri Lankesh, SD Burman, Ilayaraja and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (all Westland); and Sanjay Dutt (Juggernaut).
HarperCollins India will publish a memoir of French President Emmanuel Macron, besides biographies of Karunanidhi and Zakir Hussain.
“We open our account for 2018 with Sheila Dikshit’s innovative and well-researched pictorial book on Delhi’s evolution as a city,” says Bhaskar Roy, CEO of Palimpsest Publishers.
Hemali Sodhi, senior vice president (marketing) and publisher (children’s) at Penguin Random House India, says the publishing house has a fabulous line up of books this year.
It will come out with books like Small Acts of Freedom by Gurmehar Kaur; The Book of Limericks by Bibek Debroy; Pakistan’s Nuclear Bomb: A Story of Defiance, Deterrence and Deviance by Hassan Abbas; Pooja Bhatt’s Intoxicated! My Battle With the Bottle ; Across the Universe: The Beatles in India by Ajoy Bose; Seven Decades of Independent India by Vinod Rai and Amitendu Palit; Happiness by the Dalai Lama; and Working With Difficult Emotions by the Karmapa.
HarperCollins also has an elaborate list.
Some of its non-fiction titles include: Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State by Husain Haqqani; Devdutt Pattnaik’s The Book of Numbers: An Indian Perspective , Arun Shourie’s Anita Gets Bail: More On Courts And Their Judgments ; The McMahon Line: 100 Years of the Sino-Indian Boundary Dispute by JJ Singh; and Sitaram Yechury’s The Idea of India: Past, Present And Future .
Its fiction list has Shweta Bachchan’s debut novel Paradise Towers , Don’t Tell The Governor by Ravi Subramanian; Nikita Singh’s Letters to My Ex ; and How I Became A Farmer’s Wife by Yashodhara Lal among other books.
Aleph’s list includes Shashi Tharoor’s Why I am a Hindu ; Omar Abdullah’s part memoir, part history and part analysis My Kashmir ; Strangers No More: New Narratives from India’s Northeast by Sanjoy Hazarika; Indian Cultures as Heritage: Contemporary Pasts by Romila Thapar; Do We Not Bleed? Reflections of a 21st Century Pakistani by Mehr Tarar; N Ram’s Why India Needs a Free Press and Pilgrim Nation: Journeys of the Spirit by Devdutt Pattanaik.
Sister concern Rupa will publish Villains of Bollywood by Annu Kapur , Why I Killed the Mahatma by Koenraad Elst, Reinforcing Accountability by P Chidambaram, My Ministerial Years by Manish Tewari, Bimal Jalan’s India 2025: A Great Leap in the Next Century , Holding to Account: Inside India’s Accountability Institutions by Vinod Rai, and Kapil Sibal’s Shades of Truth .
Oxford’s list of big books for 2018 include The Aadhar Effect by NS Ramnath and Charles Assisi; Economics for Political Change: The Collected Works of Manmohan Singh ; and Three Times Unlucky and The Idea of India by Salman Khurshid.
Some of the upcoming titles from Westland Publications Ltd. are Poonachi: The Story of a Black Goat by Perumal Murugan; Eating Wasps by Anita Nair; a collection of poems in Urdu and English translation by Kaifi Azmi and Javed Akhtar’s father Jaan Nisar; and Maxwell Pereira’s book on the tandoor murder of 1995.
Juggernaut will publish books like Saurav Ganguly’s A Century is Not Enough , Benyamin’s Jasmine Days , Half the Night Is Gone by Amitabha Bagchi, Pajamas are Forgiving by Twinkle Khanna, and Power by Barkha Dutt.
Chandrahas Choudhury’s Clouds: A Novel , Boria Majumdar’s Eleven Gods and a Billion Indians: The On and Off the Field Story of Cricket in India and Beyond , AAP & Down: An Insider’s Story of India’s most Controversial Party by Mayank Gandhi, and Keki Daruwalla’s Letters to Mamma: A Novel are some of the books to be published by Simon & Schuster.
Pan Macmillan India’s titles include India: Essays by V S Naipaul, Chinatown Days by Rita Chowdhury, Tropical Detective by Zac O’Yeah and Sports: Goals of Glory by Neel Sinha. In its international titles list are The Best of Times, The Worst of Times by Michael Burleigh, Fall From Grace by Danielle Steel, The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, and Renegades by Marissa Meyer.