50 Writers, 50 Books

This book is the first of its kind 50 essays by 50 writers who thought so passionately of their favourite book that they leapt to the task of representing it here. Within these pages, Siddharth Chowdhury celebrates Upamanyu Chatterjee as ‘a bona fide home-grown rockstar’ and Anita Roy quotes David Godwin’s description of The God of Small Things as ‘a shot of heroin in the arm’. They are all celebrating moments of rupture in literary history. Not all of these essays may convince, or convince equally, some very humbly and modestly focus on what the work offers, without making any worldly claims of it being an ‘Indian classic’ or ‘one of the top fifty’. But each of these essayists, several being novelists themselves, is fashioning their argument in a sarcophagus of their love of this book, not really caring who else will be at this party. And who can resist the beauty of such passionate claims?