The smell of cappuccino or espresso with your best friend in your hand, makes your mind sing songs of romance, fable, history, parable, allegory, saga and what not. You all know whom we are talking about – ‘book’, yes, because a book is a unique portable enchantment. The more you read, the more you become eager to delve into its characters, its plot and narration. This Covid-19 pandemic has left us, numbing, nebulous and maimed in some or the other ways. Amongst, the befuddled happenings, we are still sticking to the guidelines of our government in this lockdown to make India corona free. Here, we present you a list of must-reads in this 2020 hit with numerous lazarettos so that together we can keep ourselves distracted in this crisis.
THE GLASS HOTEL – By Emily St. John Mandel
From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, a beguiling novel of beauty, money, white-collar crime, ghosts and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a colossal Ponzi scheme falls down in New York, dragging multifarious predestinations with it, this one is an extraordinary read. Intertwining together the lives of different characters, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the uninhabited regions of northern Vancouver Island, painting a thrilling picture of culpability and avarice, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts.
TOPICS OF CONVERSATION – By Miranda Popkey
Edgy, sardonic, shot through with temper and hopelessness, this novel introduces an audacious and immensely gifted new novelist, Miranda Popkey. The novel is a collection of exclusive conversations between women – the stories they tell each other, and the stories they tell themselves, about shame and love, duplicity and self-vandalism and rushes through 20 years in the life of an unnamed narrator famished for experience, and bent on upending her life. For readers of Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, Jenny Offill and Sally Rooney – a compact tour de force about violence, sex and self-deprecation in fiction is present in it.
AMERICAN DIRT – by Jeanine Cummins
From Oprah’s Book Club Pick, this masterful piece is a literary achievement filled with pathos, drama, and humanity on every page. It is one of the most important books of our times. Already being hailed as “A Grapes of Wrath for Our Times” and “A New American Classic”, this great world novel is a rare exploration into the inner hearts of people willing to sacrifice everything for a glimmer of hope.
THE NIGHT WATCHMAN – By Louise Erdrich
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of death and love with the lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humour and depth of feeling of a master craftsman. In this novel, the author creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to tussle with the best and worst compulsions of human nature. Readers will love to go through this majestic work from a revered cultural treasure.
UNCANNY VALLEY – By Anna Wiener
