1. A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
Discount: Rs. 245
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
It was, famously, six years between the last Song of Ice and Fire book and this one. What was George R.R. Martin doing all that time? Was he wandering in the wilderness? Was he sunning on the beaches of Dorne? No: he was girding his loins and rallying the banners, and he has come charging back with one of the strongest books of the series, and the year. Dance with Dragons puts us back in the main narrative stream of A Song of Ice and Fire: we go into exile with the black-humored dwarf Tyrion, raise dragons with Daenerys, walk the wall and brood with Jon Snow. The artistry and savagery of Martin's storytelling are at their finest: he has seized hold of epic fantasy and is radically refashioning it for our complex and jaded era, and the results are magnificent. It's anyone's guess who will wind up ruling the Seven Kingdoms, but in the realm of epic fantasy, there is only one true king, and it's Martin.
2. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Price: Rs. 1696
Rs. 1357
Discount: Rs. 339
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
No one knew what to expect from the half-finished manuscript that David
Foster Wallace left behind when he died. What we got was the best we
could have hoped for: a construction site of a novel, to be sure, hard
hats required, with the barest skeleton of a plot, but also some of
Wallace's most direct and personal and eloquent writing. The opening
section of the book includes a dozen pages set in the head of a junior
accountant on a regional jet, just sitting and thinking, and it's
riveting. Nobody writing now can pull off that kind of a literary MRI
job. It's a vivid reminder of what Wallace had, and what we lost, but
it's also half a great novel, and that's a good half more than what most
novelists ever write.
3. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Price: Rs. 450
Rs. 360
Discount: Rs. 90
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
This is a strange, complex and triumphantly confident reimagining of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for a different age. Marina Singh, a docile lab rat, must follow her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson into the sweaty and uncomfortable depths of the Amazon jungle, whence Swenson has vanished in search of the secret to a mysterious fertility drug. Singh finds her living with a bizarre indigenous tribe, but from there the mystery only deepens — Swenson's methods are, as the saying goes, unorthodox. It's an extraordinary pleasure to go on a journey like this, into the verdant chaos of the Amazon with an orderly, sane, exquisitely sensitive observer like Ann Patchett as your companion. The stakes are different from what they were in Conrad's day, but now, as then, the journey is as much an inner one as an outer.
4. Open City by Teju Cole
Price: Rs. 599
Rs. 509
Discount: Rs. 90
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
There's not much by way of plot to Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City,
in which a Nigerian psychiatry resident named Julius takes long walks
around New York City. But the flights of Julius' mind — both the things
he remembers and the things he elides — fuel a powerful and unnerving
inquiry into the human soul. Cole has earned flattering comparisons to
literary heavyweights like J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald and Henry James,
but Open City merits higher praise: it's a profoundly original
work, intellectually stimulating and possessing of a style both engaging
and seductive.
5. Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
Price: Rs. 325
Rs. 309
Discount: Rs. 16
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
At this point, the deliciously gloomy, ongoing adventures of the permanently hangdog Jackson Brodie form a kind of seedy, hardboiled modern epic. Depressed but indomitable, a fallen policeman in a fallen world, Brodie here tugs on a slender thread, the search for the real identity of an adopted woman in New Zealand, and an old and desperately unhappy mystery comes tumbling out. His voice duets with that of Tracy, an unmarried police detective of a certain age who seems doomed to a lonely decline until she impulsively and illegally adopts a child. It all coalesces, as things in Kate Atkinson's intricately constructed stories usually do. It's a damned depressing world, but her characters make excellent company th
6. The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
Price: Rs. 1283
Rs. 1026
Discount: Rs. 257
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
Meet the parents with real boundary issues: performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang, who use their children in cruel Candid Camera–style stunts as naturally as a painter uses a brush and oil. Annie rebels in her teens to become an actress; the more apologetic Buster, a writer. She's Oscar-nominated but a mess; he's a mess, period. Then Mom and Dad disappear. Foul play, or more high art? In his debut novel, Kevin Wilson expertly navigates between pathos and black comedy while negotiating a smart debate about the human cost of sacrificing all for one's art. Fang has bite but is also incredibly fun.
7. Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
Price: Rs. 1271
Rs. 1017
Discount: Rs. 254
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
It's tough to say what list this book belongs on, but it's the debut of a
smart, funny, wholly unique voice, and it ought to be somewhere, so
let's put it here. Kate Beaton is a cartoonist who draws wildly
expressive portraits of historical and literary figures and then makes
them say funny things. Quite often her comics reveal basic truths about
who these people were or are. (Lenin: "Is the right time for
revolution." Russian: "I do not wish to be communist." Lenin: "Would
murderous atrocities convince you sir." Russian (rubs beard
thoughtfully): "Go on ...") But the main point is that they're
hilarious. Whatever else it might be, Hark! A Vagrant is the wittiest book of the year.
8. The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler
Price: Rs. 299
Rs. 224
Discount: Rs. 75
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
Lars Kepler is Swedish, and he's being billed, naturally, as the
successor to Stieg Larsson. But Kepler casts a subtler, creepier spell
than his countryman (Kepler is actually the pseudonym for a Swedish
husband-and-wife writing team). The book starts with a bloodbath: Erik
Maria Bark, an emphatically retired hypnotherapist, is called in to
delve into the psyche of a young boy, the last survivor of a brutal
killing spree who is incapacitated by shock. What comes forth from the
depths of the boy's mind should be the end of the story, the solution to
the crime, but instead it turns out to be only the beginning of a
terrible chain of events that leads backward and forward in time. Kepler
has a remarkable feeling for physical cruelty, and his ability to
inhabit the workings of psychotic psyches is authentically shocking.
Larsson is destined to have many heirs, but of this year's crop, Kepler
is by far the best.
9. Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan
Price: Rs. 1388
Rs. 1083
Discount: Rs. 305
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
Novelists used to specialize in entertaining, funny-sad, well-observed
stories about complicated family relationships. But such books were in
surprisingly short supply this year, which makes a gem like Maine
all the more precious. Sullivan gives us three sunny, alcoholic acres
of Maine coastline and three generations of Kelleher women: the upright
matriarch, the good-girl daughter-in-law, the black sheep and the black
sheep's writer daughter. All four are busy forging complicated
compromises between domesticity and career, love and marriage. Nobody is
completely happy with the deal she's struck, but they have to learn to
live with it or strike another before it's too late.
10. The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes
Price: Rs. 650
Rs. 618
Discount: Rs. 32
(Prices are inclusive of all taxes)
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