It was a good year for readers. So many on-screen adaptations of favourites! So many new books that pushed at the boundaries of what we expected! The most generous literary award in India — the JCB Prize — went to a translated novel, Jasmine Days by Malayalam author Benyamin. The Booker Prize went to Anna Burns, an author so beset by health problems that she might only write again if the operation (funded by Booker money) needed to treat her is successful. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to Less by Andrew Sean Greer, a sweet but straightforward story about the journey of a middle-aged gay man across the world.

In my own personal reading lists, I read crime novels across the board this year — so many different ways for women to die — and also picked up on different cultures across the world through their intrepid detectives, alcoholic, unreliable witnesses, and hapless victims. It’s a good way to read the globe — through murder mysteries.

For the last column I’m writing this year, I’ve chosen three books about young women who are mostly alone. These books are undeniably Good Books, judged not just by me, but by many readers and critics across the years. What better way to end the year, right?

Watercooler

Benyamin’s second book Jasmine Days , which won the inaugural JCB Prize for literature, is perhaps the first translated book to win such a big award in India. His earlier work Goat Days ( Aadujeevitham in Malayalam) won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012. All of this background information makes Jasmine Days even more of a treat to read than it already is. It is the story of Sameera, who lives in an unnamed Middle Eastern country where revolution has just broken out. Sameera lives in a large joint family and is a radio jockey for a local station, so among thoughts of protests and politics, she’s also thinking about the Justin Bieber concert and how to best sneak out of her house so she can join a local music group. Often, I find that male writers are unable to write authentically about women — especially very young women — but Benyamin slips smoothly into Sameera’s voice and concerns without sounding like a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, or worse: patronising.

Watchlist

Is it really a watchlist if I tell you that the reading experience alone is so spooky that I think you should give the TV show a miss unless you have nerves of steel?

I’m talking about Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House , now a Netflix series, but also widely considered one of the best literary terror books ever written. (Fun fact I learnt while researching for this column: ‘terror’ is the anticipation of something bad about to happen, ‘horror’ is the feeling of revulsion after the bad thing has happened) In the book, four strangers go to stay at Hill House, a well-known ‘haunted house’, in order to study it.

Mostly, they are matter-of-fact and keep it together cheerfully, but slowly, the house starts to take a toll on all of them. There’s jump-thrills — imagine sleeping next to what you think is an empty bedroom only to hear strange footsteps during the night. Imagine wondering if you’re losing your mind, or actually being consumed inside out by whatever spirits haunt you. If you’ve ever stayed in a really old house and felt its personality as distinctly as if it were a living creature, then you’ll get why haunted house books can be so insidious and so terrifying. Layered within are feminist subtexts about being a single woman alone in the world, which intertwine beautifully with the ghost narrative. Read with the lights on.

Way back

So maybe Charlotte, Penelope Farmer’s teenage heroine in Charlotte Sometimes , isn’t completely alone in this world, but in the world she travels to most nights, asleep in her corner bed in boarding school, she definitely is. During such nights, she lives as Clare, a girl in the past, who sleeps in the same boarding school in an unspecified period, next to her younger sister, who Charlotte-as-Clare befriends. It’s an odd premise, I know, but it’s a wonderfully eerie book. Though the time travel is never quite fully explained, the horror of being stuck in someone else’s time period is constant and always looming over the reader’s head. There’s a very real sense of being disjointed, and in order to combat that, Charlotte starts to become Clare, in a way that makes people concerned about her back in her own time. If you’re a fan of the English rock band The Cure, then you already know this book from their song of the same name; if not, you’ll still love this story of identities lost and found.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of seven books, the latest one being The One Who Had Two Lives

Twitter: @reddymadhavan

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