Literary fiction
The Tin Almirah
A Kanpur joint family keeps its debts in a locked cupboard, and its griefs in an unlocked one.
Reviews
The desk reads Indian trade fiction, essays, children’s collections, and the odd thriller that claims a fact. Below is the running archive of full reviews, newest first. We do not reprint books here in full; we say what each one does, who it thinks it is for, and where it fails. Send review copies via the contact page, with a one-line pitch and a PDF or a parcel address in India.
Memoir
Lies My Driver Told Me
A Gurugram memoir that treats the family driver as the household's actual historian.
Short stories
Five Minutes Past Monsoon
Nine stories set in the same Mumbai chawl, each one ending exactly where the rain starts.
Literary fiction
The Embassy of Small Countries
A visa officer in Delhi decides, against every rule, to help one applicant a year.
Essays
Spectrum and the Second City
Twelve essays on what India's tier-two cities do to the idea of an 'Indian voice' in English.
Historical fiction
Beyond the Hibiscus Gate
A Parsi trading family in 1940s Karachi, and the gate nobody in the family will name after Partition.
Poetry collection
A Field Guide to Heartbreak
Forty poems organised, unhelpfully and beautifully, like a birdwatcher's index.
Crime / thriller
The Last Bus to Gaya
A retired constable investigates a decades-old disappearance he was ordered to close in 1998.
Mythology retelling
Ledger of Small Gods
A retelling that skips the major deities entirely for the accountant who kept their temple's books.
Domestic fiction
The Second Monsoon Wedding
A second marriage, arranged with more paperwork than the first one had love.
Working-class narrative
Notes from the Night Shift
A call-centre novel that clocks out at 6 a.m. and refuses every redemption the genre usually offers.
Literary fiction
The Cartographer of Lost Lanes
A Goan mapmaker tries to chart a village whose lanes keep being renamed by three different governments.
Memoir
Everything My Grandmother Burned
A memoir built entirely around a family habit of destroying photographs after a death.
Political fiction
The Understudy of Rajpath
A career speechwriter finally gets a byline, and immediately wishes she hadn't.
Short stories
A Thousand Small Partitions
Twelve stories about the everyday borders families draw inside a single house.
Gothic fiction
The Taxidermist's Daughter of Shimla
A colonial-era hill-station gothic that is more interested in inventory than in ghosts.
Epistolary novel
Letters I Did Not Post to Bombay
An epistolary novel made of letters explicitly never sent, addressed to a city rather than a person.
Family saga
The Inheritance of Loud Rooms
A Chennai family saga told entirely through the volume of its arguments, room by room.
Nonfiction
A Partial History of Small Presses
A history of Indian small-press publishing that admits, in its own title, how incomplete it has to be.
Verse novel
The Weight of Empty Almirahs
A verse novel that tracks one house's furniture across three sales, three funerals and one demolition.