Since we last spoke, I’ve been travelling with just a Kindle, and it’s good to be reunited with my bookshelves again. So many established authors releasing new books recently, it was difficult to choose just one for the column. The good news is that the one I selected is a collection of short stories, a genre that often gets overlooked. The better news is that I have three more new books to add to my growing pile and to possibly work in to future columns. Besides that, I also picked out the definitive Stalking Novel and a dubious YA classic. This column has a definitive theme, which is sorrow and desire, a bit depressing, but nonetheless what some of the best writing centres around.

Water cooler

I read Akhil Sharma’s Family Life when everyone else did, and I found it both deeply moving as well as deeply depressing, in the manner that Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories often are, but with more real tragedy and less slice-of-life stuff. For all that, I wondered if perhaps the sadness could have been tempered with some joy, just so the reader wasn’t left with this overwhelming sense of despair by the end. In his new collection A Life of Adventure and Delight, my wish was realised. The stories are still melancholy; mostly focusing on marriages and relationships, but there are pockets in which you can take a breath and look around and enjoy Sharma’s absolutely deft turns of phrase. My own favourite story is one called ‘If You Sing Like That For Me’, about a young woman who enters into an arranged marriage with no agency but also no resistance, and her feelings of isolation and despair. There’s also one with the characters from Family Life, about a young boy named Ajay and what happens to him immediately after his brother Birju has an accident that leaves him in a vegetative state. I believe that particular story is based on Sharma’s own life (it predates Family Life by over a decade), and he must feel the need to unpack it frequently in his writing, not that it suffers from any repetition for all that: Ajay’s voice is always a fresh mix of guilt and sorrow, his brother’s accident always truly tragic. I know it sounds sad, but there are moments of such self-awareness of human nature through the book that you must read it, if only to nod along and think that you’ve felt that way yourself.

A Life of Adventure and Delight by Akhil Sharma, Penguin Random House, ₹599

Watchlist

After following Chandigarh DJ Varnika Kundu’s story about being stalked as well as reading all the hate pieces that followed about her “character” and her “morals,” I wondered if there was an insight into the minds of these men. What were they hoping to achieve? Rape? Ownership? Or just scaring someone silly? I looked no further than John Fowles’s stunning debut novel The Collector for an imaginary but highly realistic look into the mind of an obsessive. The Collector is creepy, so prepare for your long walk home to never feel exactly the same, women readers, but the main character Frederick Clegg is also sympathetic in the way Humbert Humbert was. He imprisons a woman he’s been obsessed with in his cellar and longs for her to feel the same way about him. The novel moves between Clegg’s point of view and hers, slowly stifling you till the very end. Perhaps you are thinking this is a little dark — which it is — but we do live in dark times, after all.

The Collector by John Fowles, Vintage Classics, ₹499

Wayback

Thinking about melancholy and madness made me wonder which YA books fell back on the same trope. Flowers In The Attic by VC Andrews is a potboiler; creepy incestuous sexy, and tragic: four siblings are locked up in the attic by their grandmother when their father dies and fed meals on trays. They don’t know what’s happening outside, or what their mother is doing, and in the end, they turn to each other for comfort and, er, comfort, if you know what I mean. First published in 1979, the book is part of a series so if your fancy is tickled, you can follow along on what the siblings do next. Thanks to those themes, the book created a controversy when it was first released, with many speculating that it was based on a true story. If you need something engaging, escapist and also mildly horrifying to pep up your weekend, look no further.

Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews, Pocket Books, ₹565

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of five books, with a sixth, The One Who Swam With The Fishes, now out in bookstores; @reddymadhavan

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