At the halfway mark of the year, we have put together a list of debut novels released so far that we highly recommend for your reading.
Not Quite a Disaster after All
“It’s been a work of over ten years now. Starting back in 2010, although I didn’t write consistently,” reminisces Buku Sarkar of the inception and creation of her debut book. Deeply rooted in the author’s own lived experiences, as she currently lives in Kolkata and New York, with her central character Anjali, shown in the book from her childhood in Calcutta to her coming of age in New York City. “The core of the story was memory. Then the central character got stuck in my head and the other stories emerged gradually,” adds the author.
Read our full feature on the book here.
The Secret of More
“A love of reading led to a love of the English language – an admiration for how it could transport me into a different time and place, and into different ways of seeing and feeling. I like the element of escape in both reading and writing. I started off as a journalist, then worked as an environmental researcher and writer, and then started writing fiction,” reveals Tejaswini Apte-Rahm of the journey that led her to writer her short story collection, These Circuses That Sweep Through the Landscape (Aleph Book Company), which was shortlisted for two awards. This gave her the confidence to write her first novel of historical fiction, The Secret of More, set in early 20th century Bombay. “The novel combined my love of research and writing fiction, and so it was a wonderful creative journey,” she adds.
Read our full feature on the book here.
One Small Voice
“I’ve always been a big reader. And we were told a lot of stories in childhood; my mother is a really good storyteller. Books and movies served as portals to understanding the rest of the world, whether it’s my own experience or someone else’s. And at some point I felt I could try writing stories that could do something similar for others,” tells us Santanu Bhattacharya of his movement towards writing and storytelling. His debut book, One Small Voice, is a modern Indian millennial novel. It begins in the early 1990s when Shubhankar Trivedi is ten years old. He witnesses an act of mob violence, and for various reasons, he decides not to talk about it. The story then follows him over the next twenty-five years as he grows up and moves from Lucknow to Mumbai.
Read our full feature on the book here.
The Daughters of Madurai
“I have a memory from my childhood of watching the evening news with my family at home in Sydney. There was a segment about a case of female infanticide in Bangalore, where I was born, and the thought that that baby girl could have been me struck me almost immediately. Since that time I’ve been fascinated by the issue. I wanted to explore the whys of something as heinous as the killing of baby girls, something that continues to occur so close to where my own family members are from and still live. The more I looked into it, the more I was drawn to the complexity of the issue and the more I began to understand it. Importantly, I got to know more about the lives of the individuals impacted by it, and that’s what I wanted to tell a story about,” reveals Rajasree Variyar of the origin of her debut novel, The Daughters of Madurai.
Read our full feature on the book here.
The Woman Who Climbed Trees
"The Woman Who Climbed Trees did not start off as a novel. It started as a journal. After my mother passed I began a journal where I would write about her. This was my way of talking to her…and for a few years that was all it was, a journal where I tried to capture her voice, understand her situation, imagine her life…and slowly the idea of a book began to take shape. The journal does not feature directly in The Woman now, but its voice, its sentiment does. What Meena feels after Kaveri dies is what I felt after my mother did, and the desire to both keep in touch with my mom and to understand her is at the heart of the novel,” acquaints us Smriti Ravindra to her debut novel, that also pays “homage to the incredible land of stories and myths that these countries (India and Nepal) are.”
Read our full feature on the book here.
Sea Change
Gina Chung’s debut novel, Sea Change, has one of the most unusual relationships we’ve discovered yet, one between a young Korean-American girl named Ro and Dolores the octopus. Acquainting us to her book in her own words, Gina shares, “Sea Change is a coming-of-age story about love, loss, and cephalopods. Our 30-year-old protagonist, Ro Bae, is grappling with a breakup (her boyfriend has left her to join a mission to colonise Mars), her changing friendship with her ambitious best friend and coworker, and her strained relationship with her mother. The one bright spot in Ro’s life is Dolores, a highly intelligent giant Pacific octopus at the aquarium where she works, who also happens to be her only remaining connection to her marine biologist father, who disappeared during a research trip when Ro was a teenager. When Ro learns that Dolores is being sold to a private buyer, she must come to terms with her childhood trauma regarding her parents’ relationship and her father’s disappearance, the relationships she has neglected over the years, and her own place in an ever-changing world.”
Read our full feature on the book here.
The Long Form
“I’ve always loved reading and spending time with books. It’s why I studied literature, why I sought work in bookshops when I was younger, and it’s at least partly why I teach. It’s also how I came to translation,” tells me Kate Briggs, who is widely known and acclaimed for her seminal work, This Little Art, her ingenious take on the practice of literary translation. With The Long Form, she moves towards fiction for the first time. “So, that (translation) was the path. But it’s been a looping path, because I see reading, translating and writing as very closely connected. When I’m writing, I don’t ever feel like I’m not translating, if that makes sense. My books start with reading and they stay very close to it. I think The Long Form could be described as a translation – or maybe its own form of re-description – of other works, written by other people,” she introduces us to her debut fiction book. Below, through an insightful interview, she acquaints us further to it.
Read our full feature on the book here.
Quarterlife
“I grew up in a drowsy suburb of Pune, and while my parents encouraged my early poems, these were firmly expected to remain a hobby. By my early twenties, I was working a corporate sales job in Mumbai, and spent my days flying between markets in fifteen Indian states. This gave me a sense of the wider country, its lived reality and aspirations. I was reading writers like Naipaul, Coetzee, and Roy on these flights, and a desire to write about my times took hold. I applied for a masters to study writing in the States and got a scholarship. When I left India in 2011, I had sensed a change in the country’s air, and though I did not know to what end, some of the characters and themes in Quarterlife started to appear in short stories and early attempts at a novel. After my degree, I deleted these works, and returned home determined to grasp what was eluding me. Within a year, the 2014 election played out. All the pieces fell into place. I knew that I had found my subject,” acquaints us Devika Rege to the inception of her debut novel, Quarterlife. As the author spent the next several years trying to understand how young Indians were driving and navigating the rise of Hindu nationalism, hence Quarterlife became akin to the study of a twenty-first century democratic consciousness.
Read our full feature on the book in our upcoming, July issue of the EZ.
The East Indian
Inspired by a historical figure, Brinda Charry’s The East Indian is an exhilarating debut novel about the first native of the Indian subcontinent to arrive in Colonial America. Set during the early days of English colonisation in Jamestown, before servitude calcified into racialised slavery, The East Indian gives authentic voice to an otherwise unknown historic figure and brings the world he would have encountered to vivid life. In this coming-of-age tale, narrated by a most memorable literary rascal, Charry conjures a young character sure to be beloved by readers for years to come.
Date 22-06-2023