RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Geetanjali Shree presents us with an iconoclastic, taboo-destroying eighty-year-old protagonist, destined to challenge one of her ancient culture’s central premisses ... There is a palpable freshness to Shree’s world-building ... In its boldness and experimentation – and in its likelihood of influencing a new generation of authors – this breakthrough novel recalls Shree’s fellow Indian-born Booker laureates ... Thoroughly deserves its Booker triumph.
Anuradha Roy
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Roy’s description of the relationship between Elango and Chinna is so devastating that it is the forced abandonment of the dog that most poignantly comes to reflect the toll of human violence ... It is Roy’s ability to create perfectly formed characters – human, animal or terracotta – that gives this novel its unique quality. The Earthspinner is a love story, a political statement and a reflection on solitude, its primary preoccupation with the role of creation in the life of an artist.
Meena Kandasamy
RaveThe Financial Times (UK)The narrator of When I Hit You is an outspoken leftist and poet. A millennial, she craves romance and dissects her sexual liaisons with winningly dry humour. This pursuit is rendered with a poet’s cadence ... the narrative steams ahead at an exhilarating pace ... [Kandasamy\'s] is exactly the sort of voice the Indian far right seeks to silence. But to restrict her autopsy of violence to the Asia shelf of bookstores would be misleading. Its beating heart is a universally recognised quest for freedom and meaning in a world where women are still shockingly undervalued. There is sex; there are — surprisingly — laughs. There is a narrator more than capable of taking on the patriarchy. In the Shonda Rhimes version of Kandasamy’s novel, the narrator would get away with murder.
Siddharth Dube
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s in combining his personal story with the ravages of AIDS he witnessed that Dube advances the genre of queer memoirs in India ... His critical and vivid reporting of the time brings to mind the achievements of David France in How to Survive a Plague ... Dube gives his readers the substantial gift of hope. The sentiment is, in fact, the spine of his memoir.
Snigdha Poonam
PositiveThe Financial TimesPoonam has a gift for finding the most telling stories of our time and constructs a powerful argument ... But Dreamers isn’t a hopeful book. These youngsters, as Poonam goes on to show, are outliers. Their success is perilously difficult ... In Dreamers, we encounter two sets of young Indians. With virtually no help, one is determined to build India. The other will break it.
Neel Mukherjee
RaveThe Financial TimesIn Mukherjee’s hands, familiar fare is elevated by his empathy for the poor and the journalistic efforts he undertakes to understand them. One may even argue that Mukherjee writes about the rich only in order to write about the poor ... Mukherjee is skilled at writing about violence — against animals, gay men, elderly mothers, young wives. When his characters commit physical abuse they aren’t showing off their strength as much as they are lamenting their weaknesses. These scenes demonstrate a powerful restraint. If Mukherjee tested his readers with overwriting earlier novels, here he rewards them for their perseverance, producing his best work yet ... This bleak and entirely justified vision of modern India is what binds together Mukherjee’s stories and indeed his oeuvre. In an arid landscape so inimical to the hopes and dreams of the majority, even those who fight to improve their lives will fail.
