In Quichotte (2019) Salman Rushdie deconstructs the motif of the quest while creating a darkly humorous, grotesque, and irreverent anti-heroic saga of a modern day mock medieval knight. By Paromita Patrabonish

In Lavanya Lakshminaryan’s The Ten Percent Thief, a dystopic Indian future serves as the setting to explore existential dilemmas of human creativity in the face of an authoritarian technocracy. By Karan Madhok

“Poetry is the diary I always carry with me.” Gopal Lahiri’s collection Selected Poems (2025) cultivates a privacy that invites readers to the poet’s second self in consciousness. By Dustin Pickering

The Pakistani author Faiqa Mansab of The Sufi Storyteller speaks about women’s lives as messy, constrained, and politically situated, of motherhood as both power and erasure, about abandonment as a recurring human condition, and more. By Namrata

Sanjana Ramachandran’s debut Famous Last Questions investigates the clash of the personal with the sociopolitical. The author speaks about masking and unmasking herself, finding comfort in contradictions, and the flawed institutions of marriage, relationships, and work. By Karan Madhok

Through her memoir, Arundhati Roy revisits the foundry where her courage was forged, to the mother who didn’t prepare her for success, but inadvertently trained her to withstand both adoration and hatred to determine her survival. By Amritesh Mukherjee

Mehak Jamal’s Loal Kashmir (2025) is a witness, a tender archive of what it means to love in a region of conflict—how intimacy reshapes itself around checkpoints, how longing endures without signal bars, how the heart insists on ordinary joys in extraordinary times. By Shivani Patel

In Night in Delhi (2025), Ranbir Sidhu lays bare the city of shadowlands, and of lives pushed to the margins of visibility and worth, as it exists in continuum alongside the bright and aestheticized metropolis. By Anjali Chauhan

Amrita Pritam, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Kamala Das were all writers who, even in life, lived on the edge of taboo, scandal, and self-revelation. In death, stripped of agency, their voices have been reframed by the very people who claim to honour them. By Treya Sinha

Meena Kandasamy’s collection Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You is poetry as resistance literature, where aesthetic beauty and political activism merge to challenge a nation’s conscience. By Amritesh Mukherjee

Despite a lack of narrative focus, Anisha Lalvani’s Girls Who Stray (2025) is a welcome, urgent entry to contemporary Indian literature, a poetic voice echoing the angsts of a generation of Indians, and specifically, of Indian women who refuse to be assigned to their roles. By Karan Madhok

Told through the perspective of twisted innocence, Sakyajit Bhattacharya’s The One Legged looms large with uncertainties, unopened doors, haunted pasts, and an atmosphere of pure terror. By Sneha Pathak