Indian November fiction: Two new collections of short stories and four novels for the festive season

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Appropriation: Stories, Tanuj Solanki

A couple struggles with their relationship and a lizard in their bedroom. A dubious detective philosophises on the dreariness of murder investigations. An old writer’s lonesome life in a small town is upset by an award nomination…

In Appropriation, Tanuj Solanki demonstrates an extraordinary range: from interpersonal messiness and social drama, to meta-fictional noir, to cutting political satire. The prose modulates story by story, almost as if one is reading not one writer but many, and if there is a measure of claustrophobic intensity in some stories, there is also aching lyricism and cinematic flourish in others.

What remains a constant is the gumption to hold up a mirror to the cruelties, negotiations and reconciliations that suffuse contemporary life in India.

The Aunts of Gangapur, Rakshanda Jalil

“They come to me at night.”

Zuby has a plan to escape Delhi’s unforgiving smog; she will take her beleaguered lungs to her husband’s ancestral home in Gangapur and wait out the winter. Many years after she first arrived as a not-so-shy bride, she settles into a cottage set inside a mango orchard. But her hope for some peace and quiet is quashed soon enough, as her husband’s larger-than-life family descends, invited or uninvited.

In the days – and nights –...

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