All information sourced from publishers.

The First House, Avni Doshi

A woman’s husband walks into their bedroom one evening and tells her he wants a divorce. She is stunned. They have always had a happy marriage – or so she believed. In the days that follow, marooned with two young daughters in a suburb that has never quite felt like home, she begins coming apart.

As she sifts through the ruins of the life she had shared with her husband, she begins to notice the warning signs she chose not to see the first time around. She wanders deep into the forest of her own mind, where marital memories intermingle with myths of headless women and vengeful goddesses, messages hidden in the constellations and altars stained with blood. Over the course of a single summer, as two broods of cicadas prepare to emerge at once and fill the air with a plague of ecstatic transformation, she too is splitting, liquifying and reforming, stretching her new antennae towards the light.

Scent of the Nameless, Geet Chaturvedi, translated from the Hindi by Anita Gopalan

An unnamed middle-class office clerk lives with his wife and young daughter in a modest Mumbai apartment, leading a life of contented monotony – until a credit card unleashes desires he never knew existed. What begins as convenience becomes compulsion, then catastrophe. Debt seeps into everything: his relationships, his dignity, even his sense of self. As his humiliation deepens, the unseen machinery of markets, power and privilege tightens its grip around him.

Da, Arathi Menon

Inquisitive 13-year-old Ved’s entire universe is his adoptive father, Da. From cooking him the perfect biryani to helping him navigate his first school dance and his first girlfriend, Da lets Ved be himself.

Fiercely loving and fiercely protective, their relationship harbours a secret that could destroy them both: Da is gay at a time when Section 377, a colonial law, labels homosexuality a crime. Beyond the law, vigilante gangs prowl the shadows, targeting those they deem “unnatural” as Da and Ved’s happy existence grows ever more fragile.

Set in an Indian city in 2013, Da is a tender story of a boy caught between devotion and fear, chronicling the everyday courage it takes to love someone the world refuses to accept.

Grief Burns Like Fever, Minakshi Thakur

As the city buckles under a harsh lockdown, lives get connected – and separated – by events beyond anybody’s control. An ambulance driver spends his days ferrying bodies from the hospital to crematoriums, an adolescent thinks of ways to survive after his mother’s passing, a woman attempts to make sense of her life and marriage while another seeks to break out of the situation she has been captive in for decades. Will they find their way through the darkness or will the maze swallow them up before the light can reach them?

Homecoming, Omair Ahmed

After years of trying to belong to Lucknow, once a city of poetry and grace where he had hoped to find something of the father he had lost, Hassan meets a kindred spirit – Ahmed Sahib, an elderly man of quiet warmth and dignity, although diminished in circumstance. Ahmed Sahib shows him a Lucknow that could become home, and gives him the gift of unspoken friendship.

Later, Ahmed Sahib also leads him to love – to Samina, seeking a harbour as Hassan himself has done for half a lifetime. Bound by their common search, they try to make a home in Lucknow, but the city is changing. When an exquisite little monument in the old quarter is demolished, departure becomes inevitable. Will the old search begin once again in a distant land? Will they be together in the search again? And where will it take them?

The Red Badge, Rajesh R Varma, translated from the Malayalam by J Devika

Kerala, 1974. Rajesh, the fourth-standard topper in a Malayalam-medium school in Tiruvalla, founded by his upper-caste Kshatriya ancestors, is excited to move to the big English-medium school there. But things go awry. Grappling with the challenges of English-medium studies, he is stuck in the middle of the rank-list. Desperation grows when the socially inferior Veeramani – the son of Rajesh’s father’s boss – gets the red badge for coming first. Rajesh goes into a tailspin, and even seeks divine intervention. Meanwhile, a regime deifying the idea of an Undivided Bharata gains power in the country, and a horrifying reign of persecution follows – one that might make way for Rajesh to finally own the coveted red badge.