Scorching titles, tepid pages: The biggest book releases of 2014

Elections are good for the publishing business. And so nearly every Indian publisher tried to make the most of the politically-charged atmosphere with "memoirs" of politicians, journalists and bureaucrats that looked back on recent controversies and revealed "explosive" new details. These did well, both in terms of sales and the media space they occupied. In other ways, too, 2014 has been the year when non-fiction titles have far overshadowed fiction, with one remarkable exception.

Sanjaya Baru's The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh was the biggest book of the year. Its release, just as the first round of voting got under way in April, was timed just right to bump up curiosity and sales even though its revelations, that Sonia Gandhi kept tabs on Singh and government files, may not be something readers didn't know about or suspect.

Next came Natwar Singh's One Life is Not Enough and readers, it seems, were ready to overlook the dreary style and the author's self-absorption for the tidbits on how it wasn't "the voice of conscience" that kept Sonia Gandhi from becoming PM in 2004, but something more prosaic — the advice, nay, warning of her son Rahul.

Vinod Rai's Not Just an Accountant - A Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper, the former CAG's account of his conduct in various scams that continue to hog headlines, added one more nail to the UPA coffin, seeming to indict the former PM himself of acts of omission in the coal scam. And now, there's Rajdeep Sardesai's account of 2014: The Election That Changed India, a bird's eye view of the rise of Narendra Modi.

Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others may have bitten the dust at the Booker Prize sweepstakes, but it is definitely the most significant work of fiction in the English language to emerge from the subcontinent this year. It not just brings alive the Calcutta of the 1970s, ravaged by a bloody insurgency but also shines a light on India's continued war against the Naxals.

The thespian can write as well. Naseeruddin Shah's autobiography was a refreshing change from the usual safe and careful books that celebrities come out. And Then One Day spared no one, least of all Shah himself, ripping off the smiling, over made-up masks of some of the holiest cows of Indian cinema. Wish Dilip Kumar had shown traces of the same spirit in his autobiography, The Substance and the Shadow, which too came out this year.

Sahara: The Untold Story by senior business journalist Tamal Bandaopadhyay is one of the most important books of the year. And not because it is India's first serious book on corporate fraud, or because it lucidly explicates the very complicated financial web that Subroto Roy built over decades. The book's release was a landmark because the company had taken the publishers to court, alleging defamatory content and threatened to stop its publication; but then there was a settlement and the book came out, albeit with a "disclaimer" from Sahara on page one. This year has seen two other books in the genre, Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis and The Descent of Air India, that expose and demystify the complex weave of corporate chicanery — but these were self-published by the authors as the traditional publishers they had given the books to, backed out under pressure.

Seen photographs of the long queues of people in West Bromwich waiting to get their copy of Sachin Tendulkar's Playing it my Way signed by the author? Tendulkar is god, and only carpers will point out that his autobiography only confirms his public image and does not give any insights into the murky goings'on inside the dressing room

One is a best-selling American author whose books have sold more than 300 copies; the other is a best-selling India author who's often called the desi Dan Brown. Private India, co-written by James Patterson and Ashwin Sanghi, is the latest book in the former's Private franchise and set in Mumbai. A unique experiment.

The centenary of World War I has been the occasion for several books on the Great War, especially the Indian contribution to Britain's war effort. As Vedica Kant's If I Die Here, Who Will Remember Me? India and the World War One reveals, as many as one million Indians from all over the subcontinent fought on various fronts. Many wrote letters home (David Omissi's Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers' Letters, 1914-18), which were poignant, funny, and moving, vividly evoking the world of the Western Front seen through the eyes of the 'subaltern' Indian.