The best bookshelf of 2018

2018 was a commendable year for offerings in history and biography

In a long-held tradition the last column of the year is dedicated to some of the best reading of the year across genres. If fiction, in Albert Camus’s words, is the lie by which writers tell the truth, then three novels by accomplished Indian practitioners stood out for the intricacy and innovation of the form.

Amitabha Bagchi’s earlier works, Above Average and The Householder, are deft explorations of middle-class life but his latest, Half the Night Is Gone (Juggernaut; Rs 599), is altogether more ambitious. Part epistolary novel, part family chronicle spanning the 20th century, its fiction-within-fiction layering is an exhumation