Authors to Watch Out For: 2024 As we step into 2024 and get out of snug living rooms with briefcases and corduroys and coats, here’s a list of Indian authors to buy this January: Abraham Verghese of his latest, ‘The Covenant of Water’: The book is set in Kerela over 77 years and it’ll feel like a weight of dumbbells and political, familial histories. It’s beautifully written, every page, every line is hand picked. Nestled between waves of water and land turning from British dominance to strife with communism, this story tells it all beautifully, set at the backdrop of one family’s history. ‘What binds a family isn’t blood, but the secrets they share, secrets that bind them together and bring to their knees when revealed’.’What is worry, but the worry of what future holds?’ Every thought is powerful, leaves you stirred and holding on to lands or loved ones, not knowing which one is which for a little bit. Verghese happens to be a professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice Chair of Education at the Stanford University Medical School. He is also the author of the best-selling book Cutting for Stone. Janika Oza of ‘A History of Burning’: It’s about an Indo-Ugandan family, it spans continents and a century, it’s beautifully complex yet a pleasure to read for how every word is etched marking its own territory. It spans across Uganda, India, England and Canada and is excellent for a debut effort at historical fiction leaving you spell bound with every word of how family dramas drape. She writes of the process, “I was really thinking deeply about what it means to be connected to place, what it means to be connected to land, and to know the smell of the soil, the color the dirt takes on after it rains and then to be somewhere [where] that is no longer the case.” She transports us through this exact image through this book, beautifully. Devangana Mishra of ‘26, Kamala Nehru Ridge, Civil Lines, Delhi’: We love this girl and how she uses verse and poetry to open doors and windows and ideas and honesty so complex it’s hard to tell if it’s easy or difficult, the words she writes leave us holding on to every one of the few pages we’ve read thus far. She wrote a debut book of poetry which got lost in the piles, but this one is a must buy to understand a single Muslim girl’s journey through religions and splitting India of 1947, a pivotal time in Indian history. The book feels like urdu from a charlatan’s mouth. Zeyad Masroor Khan of ‘City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh’: An excellent memoir of a boy as he recounts his time growing up in a ghetto of Aligarh, Upar Kot after the Babri Masjid demolition, an innocent act of a switch could cause a riot, a history of everyday violence and brutality now a part of everyday, the story of everyday Aligarh from a boy born and raised there, troubling, but true, how crime becomes skin and vice versa in some cities. S B Divya of her sci-fi magic, ‘Meru’: We love her imagination and her confidence with the grasp of what she knows of science and substance and outer space, her and her pilot and their attempt at a space opera mostly met in every page. Her book is an understanding of outer space from the realm of personal relationships, the beauty of bonds, an inter-stellar glance at the everyday love loops we’re tangled in, it’s beautiful how she’s managed to turn us into lovers of science fiction, philosophy and fantasy through a simple love story.