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From Gurnah to Adichie: Fiction you must read in 2025

Five upcoming books that explore how permanent happiness can be, and the value of a second chance

Here's what you must read

The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin) by Ocean Vuong marks the acclaimed poet’s return to the novel, after his 2019 debut On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. This book tells the story of a 19-year-old boy whose suicide attempt is foiled by an old woman suffering from dementia. He becomes her caretaker and an unlikely bond ensues which tests the human capacity to do anything for “one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.”

Theft (Bloomsbury) by Abdulrazak Gurnah is the Nobel laureate’s latest offering, about three children growing up in the East African nation of Zanzibar. One of them is a servant boy who is working in the other’s house and is fired after a false accusation, even as the trio remains close. Love, loyalty and longevity are tested in this bildungsroman.

Dream Count (HarperCollins) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the latest novel by the author of the popular We Should All Be Feminists. It tells the story of four women from various walks of life who are reflecting on choices, regrets and everything that comes in the time between. From the memory of past loves to the tangible reality of your current ones, the book asks a painful question, “Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state?”

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Wikimedia Commons)

Absolute Jafar (HarperCollins) by Sarnath Banerjee tells two stories, that of a middle-aged man, Brighu, contemplating the life he’s living in Berlin and the one he has left behind in Delhi, and of Jafar, a boy born to an Indo-Pak couple, and the stories he hears about cities he can never go back to like his parents due to perennial border tensions — Calcutta and Karachi.

Also Read | Best of books: The year I switched to audiobooks and why you should too

Sarnath Banerjee (A Suitable Agency)

Melanin (HarperCollins) by Jeet Thayil is a novel of many forms by the Booker-shortlisted writer, who most recently edited the Penguin Book of Indian Poets. It is a “documentary novel which traverses continents and times, and straddles the lines between fiction and non-fiction, memoir and novel, prose and poetry.”

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