Indians

With a flood of titles for young adults, desi scribes mutating en masse into authors, and word counts cascading in various domains — crime, spirituality, business, history, biography — DNA gives you the lowdown on what’s coming your way from Indian authors this year.

It is official, 2010 is all booked up. After a year of political kiss-and-tells and romance cooing chapter and verse, bookworms can curl up to new yarns even as nonfiction maintains gravitas with corporate mantras. Those with shorter attention spans, don’t lose the plot; Penguin lines up crispy Metro Reads as Westland does novellas. Reviews will beatify or crucify, every picture won’t tell a story and bad covers will still happen to good books. In the last year of this decade, don’t shush piracy either — just take it as read.

The Indian tongue continues to have its wicked way with the English word. IWE will gain from Westland’s Dreaming In Hindi, Coming Awake In Another Language by Kathleen Russell Rich and HarperCollins’ May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss by Arnab Ray.

Health buffs will be served Rujuta Diwekar’s diet manual (Westland) with Karen Anand’s Lean Cuisine (HarperCollins) while several cookbooks simmer gently in the Random House pot.

Chetan Bhagat sees “more domestic fiction, and an increased range of genres, particularly teen fiction,” while hoping for “more non-fiction titles to increase our understanding of Indian issues.” Rupa’s Kapish Mehra avers: “The language has to be good and the connect immediate.” He also rues a rising invisibility of the books page, as “high-end literature is not where it used to be.”

Says novelist Shashi Deshpande: “Next year, I expect, will be like any year. But the price rise is something I am very concerned about.” Dronequill’s Jamuna Pani thinks 2010 may well be the year of translations, “as more and more Indians seeking roots in their local culture are nevertheless English-speaking.” Renuka Chatterjee, Westland’s chief editor, sees graphic novels “beginning to come into their own.”

Predicts Hachette’s Thomas Abraham: “2010 looks like being the year of YA (young adults) post-Stephenie Meyer, and a host of similar series are expected to take off. There’s also a discernible shift towards commercial genres where Indian writing is concerned, so we should see a lot more experimental genre fiction…The blockbuster will almost certainly be Shantaram 2.”

Scribes will take their bylines forward. Absolute Khushwant: The Low-Down On Life, Death And Most Things In Between by Khushwant Singh with Humra Quraishi, Arun Shourie’s We Must Have No Price, The Ambanis And The Battle For India by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Alam Srinivas, and First Draft Of History: The Making Of Modern India by BG Verghese.

Shobhaa De gets fictional with Sethji along Farrukh Dhondy’s Adultery And Other Stories, Manu Joseph’s Serious Men, CNN-IBN reporter Amrita Tripathi’s Broken News, NDTV anchor Sunetra Choudhary’s Braking News, Kishwar Desai’s Witness The Night, Binoo John’s The Last Song Of Savio De Souza, and The Tehelka Book Of Stories tagged by a Tarun Tejpal introduction.

January will see Anita Nair’s Lessons In Forgetting (HarperCollins). Says Anita: “Using cyclone as a metaphor, this is the story of two people whose lives and paths cross as they resurrect themselves from total devastation.” Shreekumar Varma describes his upcoming Maria (HarperCollins) as “a novel of love and memory, with a bit of the thriller thrown in

Usha KR says about her new novel Monkey Man (Penguin), “In the first week of the new millennium, four people spot a strange creature on Bangalore’s Ammanugudi Street, and are invited to speak about it on radio. What is it that they see in the gathering darkness? The novel traces their lives and interlinked destinies.”

Rupa has Return To Almora by Nobel laureate RK Pachauri and Victoria And Abdul: The True Story Of The Queen’s Closest Confidante by Shrabani Basu coming up. Dronequill unveils Nazia Mallick’s Meshes And Smoke while Picador presents Aatish Taseer’s The Temple-goers and Siddharth Chowdhury’s Day Scholar, a Man Asian-shortlisted novel.

HarperCollins hawks Devapriya Roy’s The Vague Woman’s Handbook, Diksha Basu’s From Brooklyn To Bandra and Rimi Chatterjee’s Black Light. Hachette peddles Pradeep Sebastian’s The Groaning Shelf And Other Instances Of Book Love, Zac O’Yeah’s Once Upon A Time In Scandinavistan as DBK Thomas takes The Rear Entrance.

Penguin cheers Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way to Go, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s One Amazing Thing and It Rained All Night by Buddhadeva Bose, a first-person account of an extramarital affair. Westland/Tranquebar tenders Lie, a graphic novel by Gautam Bhatia and Kashmir Blues by Urmilla Deshpande.
Sajita Nair’s She’s A Jolly Good Fellow (Hachette) and Maha Khan Phillips’ Beautiful From This Angle (Penguin) compose chick-lit while Amit Varma pegs his Hotel Patiala as “a psychological novel”. Jahnavi Barua’s Rebirth (Penguin) is the story of a young Assamese woman who moves to Bangalore that “begins at a critical point, a period of stress in the young woman’s marriage.”