The JCB Prize for Literature has announced its ten-novel longlist for 2024. It features five books originally written in English, and five works translated into English from Bengali (two), Marathi (two), and Malayalam (one). The shortlist of five books will be announced on October 23, and the winner, on November 23.

The winner will receive a cash prize of Rs 25 lakh. If a translated work is chosen as the winner, the translator will receive an additional Rs 10 lakh. Moreover, each of the five shortlisted authors will be awarded Rs 1 lakh, with an additional Rs 50,000 awarded to the translator if the shortlisted work is a translation.

The jury was chaired by author, translator, and poet Jerry Pinto, and includes scholar and translator Tridip Suhrud; art historian and curator Deepthi Sasidharan; filmmaker and writer Shaunak Sen; and artist Aqui Thami.

The longlist was selected from a range of submissions representing writers from sixteen states and books translated from seven different languages. This is translator Jayasree Kalathil’s third appearance on the longlist after Moustache (2020 winner) and Valli (2022 shortlist), and V Ramaswamy’s second, after The Nemesis (2023 shortlist). The list also has four debut novels, two of which are translated works.

Mita Kapur, the director of the Prize said, “The 2024 Longlist presents a diverse array of Indian fiction, showcasing ten books that offer an evocative portrayal of the varied and complex nature of life in India. This year’s Longlist explores a range of themes and experiences, capturing both the intricacies of daily life and the more profound, extraordinary moments.”

Here is the longlist of ten novels, followed by short descriptions of each:

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Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari

In the foothills of the Western Ghats, the village of Vaiga is enduring the worst storm it has seen in decades: ceaseless rain, fallen trees, flooded river, severe power cuts. But another, more insidious storm is brewing beneath the surface. It begins as a rumour of an illicit affair – a rumour that brings Saud and his sons to Vaiga in search of Burhan. The rumour soon takes on a life of its own, fuelled by feverish WhatsApp messages. In the ensuing chaos, Vaiga erupts into violence and a mob takes to the street, baying for blood.

Hurda, Atharva Pandit

Valentine’s Day 2013 Murwani, a village in Maharashtra. Three sisters – Anisha, Sanchita and Priyanka – disappeared from school that afternoon. No one knows where they went or why, but everyone remembers they were up to no good. Six years later, a journalist from Mumbai returns to the scene of the crime and tries to piece together what exactly happened that fateful day.

Hurda is a story told through the voices of the many whose lives intersected with those of the three sisters. Based on a real-life incident, this novel takes a surgical knife to contemporary India and sets up for display its pervasive and deep misogyny.

Of Mothers and Other Perishables, Radhika Oberoi

The morbidly funny voice of a dead woman echoes through the walls of her beloved storeroom, a compact space that contains her earthly belongings: cupboards full of silk sarees and baby clothes, albums of black-and-white photographs, a collection of vinyl records, a record player, old leather suitcases, an ebony-and-gold sewing machine. She reminisces about the past, and about the disease that causes her untimely death.

Her storeroom becomes a quaint bioscope of her life in Delhi as a young woman in the 1970s and 80s, decades that bring her romance, marriage, and motherhood.

The novel oscillates between the dead woman’s yearnings and the immediacy and excitement of a parallel narrative – her daughter’s. Nicknamed The Wailer (from the band Bob Marley and the Wailers), the dead woman’s daughter offers a sardonic glimpse into the world of advertising – the night before a presentation, temperamental colleagues, the buzz of writers and art directors at work. But the peculiar dynamics of The Wailer’s advertising firm alter drastically when protests break out in the city of Delhi. Protesters swarm the streets, hollering against a new bill that persecutes the Muslim community. A Muslim art director is drawn to the pulsing heart of this movement. The Wailer, too, is inadvertently involved.

Both narratives – the deceased mother’s digressional memories, and The Wailer’s palpable reality – also tell of Toon, The Wailer’s younger sister, who is the CEO of a coffee startup. Their worlds converge to offer shards of the past, and navigate through a turbulent present. Personal and political histories collide in this haunting tale of many betrayals.

Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, Upamanyu Chatterjee

One summer morning in 1977, 19 year old Lorenzo Senesi of Aquilina, Italy, drives his Vespa motorscooter into a speeding Fiat and breaks his forearm. It keeps him in bed for a month, and his boggled mind thinks of unfamiliar things: Where has he come from? Where is he going? And how to find out more about where he ought to go?

When he recovers, he enrols for a course in physiotherapy. He also joins a prayer group, and visits Praglia Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in the foothills outside Padua.

The monastery will become his home for ten years, its isolation and discipline the anchors of his life, and then send him to a Benedictine ashram in faraway Bangladesh – a village in Khulna district, where monsoon clouds as black as night descend right down to river and earth. He will spend many years here. He will pray seven times a day, learn to speak Bengali and wash his clothes in the river, paint a small chapel, start a physiotherapy clinic to ease bodies out of pain, and fall, unexpectedly, in love. And he will find that a life of service to God is enough, but that it is also not enough.

The Distaste of the Earth, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih

The novel imaginatively weaves an ancient world of Khasi kings and queens, warriors and plunderers, and chronicles the sorrows of a young man caught up in that world.

This layered fictional history of a land where a queen falls in love with a pauper, where animals recount their tales of woe against man, and where retribution – destructive to both good and bad – arrives, sooner or later, begins in a pata, the local bar, whose patrons form a microcosm of the world around them.

Nongkynrih masterfully equips these endearing characters to explore, through the tragic life of the protagonist, the nature of human existence, raising questions about earthly powers, godly dispensation, and where our anthropocentric attitude is leading us. Through a universe of fierce warriors and ruthless wars, the novel grapples with themes such as greed and oppression, revenge and justice, love and the tragedy of love, strife and the peace that comes when one “unyokes” oneself, “disconnected from the sources of wretchedness, a fluffy down in the wind of fortune”.

The novel reimagines a world where man is a despot, where God is ostensibly absent, perhaps much like our own, outlining issues at once ancient and contemporary with startling clarity.

Talashnama: The Quest, Ismail Darbesh, translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy

Set in Sadnahati, a Muslim-majority village in West Bengal, Talashnama is the story of Riziya, an educated and headstrong woman with an anguished past.

Hounded by a devastating secret, Riziya elopes with her tutor, Suman Nath, a Hindu, although it is Tahirul – the local Imam torn between duty and desire – who is her true love. On the day she leaves, she allegedly writes anti-Islamic graffiti on the wall of the village mosque - an incident that both baffles and enrages the villagers. Ten years later, Suman Nath takes his own life, and Riziya must return to a Sadnahati fraught with disapproval and condemnation.

Maria, Just Maria, Sandhya Mary, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil

Following the death of her grandfather, Maria has stopped speaking – not because she can’t, but because she doesn’t want to.

Now in a psychiatric hospital, as she begins the process of “reconnecting with reality”, Maria recalls her journey of being “just Maria” – a girl born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, whose companions were a grandfather who took her along to wander around the village and its toddy shops, a great-aunt with dementia who challenged Maria's position as the youngest in the family, a dog with a penchant for philosophy, various long-dead family members including a great-grandmother with a knack for prophecies, a patron saint who insisted on interfering in people’s affairs, and Karthav Eesho Mishiha with whom Maria has regular conversations.

The novel is an exuberant and moving story of a woman trying to find her place in this world.

Sanatan, Sharankumar Limbale, translated from the Marathi by Paromita Sengupta, Penguin India

Sanatan is the gut-wrenching story of Bhimnak Mahar and his ilk, who have been subjected to barbaric abuse and inhuman discrimination by the upper castes over centuries. The story begins with the young Bhimnak in pre-Independence India. It then traverses time and geographical boundaries to end with Bhimnak’s grandson. The circular narrative pattern is reflective of the endless cycle of pain that the Mahars are unable to break free from, no matter how hard they try, no matter where they go, no matter if they change their identity and religion.

Using myths, the Puranas and historical texts as resources, Sharankumar Limbale rewrites Dalit history in this novel as he attempts to tell the truth, with an intention to build what he calls “a new and progressive social order”. Limbale not only brings his reader face to face with uncomfortable realities but also suggests what could be an alternative social order in the future.

Leaf, Water and Flow, Avadhoot Dongare, translated from the Marathi by Nadeem Khan

We live as social beings. But our being social includes power structures of various kinds – from the language that we speak and write into the state or anti-state actors that claim to run some of these structures. The novel attempts to grapple with these structures, the individuals who are part of these structures and also who are in conflict with these structures.

There is Naxalite/Maoist politics, there is an egret who has seen a baby die in a village in central India, there is an author (perhaps the one who had written a novel titled The Story of Being Useless), there is a teak-leaf which is dying, there is a “professional revolutionary” who has come out of incarceration, there is an adivasi woman who was once part of a Maoist dalam, there is a wife of a police sub-inspector, and there is a reader who reads this novel and ends it with his comments. There are some more such voices in the novel. Some of them tell their stories, some of them try to contribute to the stories of others, and a few of them are perhaps also thinking about how to end this binary and be a part of every story.

The One Legged, Sakyajit Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Rituparna Mukherjee

Rearing a child is not easy, especially with monsters lurking around and within.

On one leg, leaning,
Picking tamarinds, swaying.
In one hand a pot of salt,
In the other, a knife.
Cutting ears, sprinkling salt, house to house.

When the mouldy wall of the old mansion began to heave and the shadows of the cursed tree ruffled his nights, Tunu learned how darkness lives not only at night– that the home itself is like a sleeping giant, shrouded in secrets, grief and loss. As the receding history repeated itself, Tunu turned slowly, but definitely, into someone else.