The short stories in Kanishk Tharoor’s Swimmer Among the Stars are testament to the fact that for a new generation of internationalised writers, the world truly is their oyster. Story traditions, languages, histories and memories from every corner of the globe are the nacre that cover the grains of sand and smooth them into pearls.

Read an excerpt here.

Sophia Khan’s Yasmeen searches the darker corners of loneliness within a family. Cradled in the routine of the quotidian, there are so many words unsaid, so many smiles that never reach the eyes, so many tears that splash into cups of coffee that seeking answers in the past does not always provide comfort.

Read an excerpt here.

Manu S Pillai’s The Ivory Throne literally mines the treasure troves of history. He finds the lonely women behind the dazzling jewels that stud the persons and temples of the erstwhile rulers of Travancore and reminds us that what we call history is the lived life of another, separated from us in time but not in temperament.

Read an excerpt here.

Madhu Gurung’s The Keeper of Memories stays true to its evocative title and through remembered lives, legends, rites and rituals, infuses the historical migration of the Gorkhas into north-eastern India with a keen though entirely unsentimental family intimacy.

From the blurb: "In the winter of her life, Dharamshila, the keeper of memories of her family of brave Gorkha warriors, tells her grandchildren the story of their ancestors who came from Nepal as conquerors and fought the British in the Khalanga War in Dehradun. As the family makes India its home, the sons embark on their own journeys, each more varied than the other – spanning Japanese prison camps in Singapore, Chindit operations in Burma, the adrenaline rush of football clubs in Calcutta and the arc lights of the film industry in Bombay."

Akshay Mukul’s Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India masterfully details how a small regional press and a determined individual ideologue can influence the mind-set of a nation, reconstruct a religion and seed the politics of separatism that flowers nearly a century later.

Read an excerpt here.

Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Furies reveals the underbelly of India’s cataclysmic Partition through private letters, official communiques, personal relationships and bureaucratic inertia. Hajari shows that our understanding of the past must be periodically refreshed if we are to carry its lessons meaningfully into the present.

Read the review here.