This week’s edition of this magazine is themed around ‘festivals and communities’ and so is this column. I work from home, and barely have contact with the outside world; except maybe Facebook and Twitter, which, as we all know, are sort of echo chambers, everyone validating your opinion, and even when they don’t, they validate you by acknowledging you. Two of my book picks this week mention social media, but only to use them as a way of saying what everyone is thinking. Let’s get started!

Water cooler

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie made it to the Booker Longlist and, in my view, should have travelled even further up the ranking list. It’s a modern-day retelling of Sophocles’s Antigone, except with British-Pakistani characters, but don’t let the heavy Greek drama-ness put you off. Two sisters, Isma and Aneeka, in the US and London, respectively, worry about their brother Parvaiz (Aneeka’s twin), who bought into the jihadist propaganda and went off to Syria. Into this comes a man, Eammon, the anglicised son of the home secretary, who, though Muslim himself, has chosen to deny his faith. You’re entangled with these people almost from the get go, as the opening chapter describes Isma at Heathrow, stopped by security and having to answer their questions as they go through her luggage. Later, there are Twitter streams and news articles, heartbreak and even a point-of-view chapter from Parvaiz, who is increasingly homesick and afraid of his decision, and just wants to go home. Everyone’s talking about this book, and how good it is, and once you read it, you’ll be able to join the party too.

Watchlist

For a while, YA Twitter was abuzz and aghast at a definite scam. This one book which no one had heard of had suddenly topped the NYT bestseller charts, and, what was worse, had toppled the current favourite, namely The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Eventually the scam was revealed for what it was (the author and her publicists placed several large orders at bookstores that reported to The New York Times), and The Hate U Give went back to its position, unchallenged. Is it that good? It is. Starr is from a “bad neighbourhood” and is a witness to her friend Khalil being shot by a police officer for no crime other than his skin colour. Her parents are divided on the issue, her mother wants to move, her father wants to stay and fix the place they’ve all grown up with. In the meanwhile, Starr has to deal with a possibly racist best friend, her parents fighting and whether or not to join the protests around Khalil’s death or keep her head down, as she’s been taught to do as a black woman in America.

This book is like a punch in the gut, and not just for the very topical conversation around police shootings in America either.

Wayback

Stephen King isn’t the sort of author you normally name drop to your more erudite friends. That is, until you recognise the range and width of his writing and realise that just because someone sells millions of copies, doesn’t mean they’re bad or lazy writers. In fact, King’s writing can be enjoyed across audiences: for the plot junkie, there’s plenty of it, for people who love character-based writing, there’s so much loving detail and backstory to each person populating his books that you would probably recognise them going down the street. And his stories are creepy, they sneak up on you and haunt you, and you find yourself sleeping with the light on, just in case Pennywise, the clown from It, comes crawling out of a drain. It just got made into a movie, and probably cemented a lot of people’s clown phobias. It’s based in the fictional town of Derry, and a group of kids reunite 28 years later to kill the creature that haunted them one summer years ago. Sometimes you can see the set-ups coming, but so masterfully does King plot that instead of rolling your eyes you want to scream at the characters like you would at a movie screen: “Watch out! There’s someone behind you!”

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of six books, the latest being The One Who Swam With The Fishes, now out in bookstores ; @reddymadhavan

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