Em and The Big Hoom

Em and The Big Hoom is everything beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. It’s a love story; an exploration of madness. It’s to see Bombay up close from a damp flat in Mahim, and peer into letters exchanged by young Em and The Big Hoom. It’s to slowly fall in love with the ink-stained ridges of this book and recommend it to everyone you meet.

The God of Small Things

Twins, Estha and Rahel, fatly baffled bluebottles in Kerala, fishswimming, jams and jellies and the god of small things make up this novel. It is my favourite book of all time, and everything I wish I could do with a story. It is structurally inventive, gorgeously written and characterful.

Room

I absolutely love novels with an unusual narrative voice, and especially those written for adults with child narrators (for my own novel reasons too). The language is often so playful and arresting. Room is the first of the category that I ever read and simply could not forget Jack’s voice.

Matilda

Roald Dahl’s Matilda read like her life depended on it. And in some ways, it really did. As a child, I so loved this magical story of a steadfast little reader who dealt with TV-watching grown-ups with courage and power.
Still do.

Jazz

I read Jazz most recently, as part of a reading-as-a-writer course. It’s rare for a novel you read as an adult to make it to your favourites list—but this one has. The only question I ask despite re-reading it is: How did she do it?

The Eyre Affair

An oddball collision of detective fiction and literature. Here, literary detective Thursday Next (literally) dives into the pages of Jane Eyre after a notorious villain, who has earlier stolen original manuscripts, has Jane Eyre as his next target. The Eyre Affair is the first in the series where bookworms and literary crimes are as real a threat as the plunging economy, and I am so here for it.