2025 in Books: What Arvind Subramanian, Naseeruddin Shah, Shashi Tharoor recommend

Naseeruddin Shah, actor and director

2025 was a challenging year to find the time to read, but three books stood out. The memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is a deeply intimate and unflinching account of her life, particularly her difficult, complex, tempestuous and unbreakable relationship with her formidable mother, Mary Roy, who was a “dreamer, warrior, teacher” (and, to put it politely, a challenge). Roy describes her mother as “my shelter and my storm,” exploring how Mary, a brilliant educator and women’s rights activist, shaped her journey as a woman and a writer, from her childhood in Kerala to her global prominence.

Kiran Desai’s highly anticipated novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, is a sweeping cross-continental saga about two young Indian-Americans whose destinies intersect despite their families’ initial attempt at an awkward, unsuccessful arranged introduction. The novel is a rich exploration of love, alienation and identity, navigating how forces like class, history, race and family bonds shape their search for connection and belonging.

Operation Sindoor: The Untold Story of India’s Deep Strikes Inside Pakistan by Lt Gen KJS Dhillon (Retd) provides a blow-by-blow account of Operation Sindoor, India’s precision strike operation against terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan in response to the April 2025 Pahalgam attack. The narrative offers unrevealed insights into the strategic planning, execution and the ensuing “Four-Day War” and busts some “fake news” as well.

Shashi Tharoor, Congress MP, Thiruvananthapuram

I recently devoured Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Colour in just one afternoon. On the face of it, it is a very female novel, about a nail salon owned by a former boxer and the women who work there, all of whom are given the name tag Susan, a comment on how Asian faces and names are seen as interchangeable in Western countries. They speak to each other in their (unnamed) language, commenting on and making fun of their clients. But very soon, you start noticing darker undertones to the harmless jokes. Racism, racial stereotypes and how these women navigate them, the loneliness and violence in forced migration rear their heads. The result is often a chilling read. I will never get a haircut at my local salon again without thinking of the Susans in this debut novel.

Deepa Bhasthi, writer and translator. International Booker Prize winner 2025

Perhaps my favourite book of the year was Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. For Indians, independence is so informed by Partition and the relationship with Pakistan that we tend to overlook the broader geographic scope of decolonisation. Getting to know more about the history of Burma, Burmese ethnocentrism and the sad fate of hundreds of thousands of Indians living there who had to leave, was a real education. Another book that I really enjoyed was by my friend Robert Malley who along with Hussein Agha has written a searing history of the Israel-Palestine struggle called Tomorrow is Yesterday. While empathetic to the common humanity of all sides, it is also an indictment of Israel, the West and the Arab world for consistently letting down Palestinians. It is especially instructive in illustrating how the obsession with a two-state solution precluded the search for other avenues for dealing with this existential struggle between two peoples with a shared, violent history, claiming the same piece of land as home.

Arvind Subramanian, Former Chief Economic Adviser

I’ve just finished reading a sobering and highly instructive recent book, Exploring the Poverty Question, in which Utsa Patnaik exposes brazen fallacies in standard measures of poverty in India, which are routinely cited to present the neoliberal political economy that India has embraced since 1991 as a resounding success. Putting nutritional criteria on centre stage, she raises the question: how can poverty have decreased in the country when hunger has so measurably risen?

I also re-read The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, a novel with the most beautiful English prose written in the last half century, a poignant portrayal of the lives and loves of a woman of remarkable character and poise, living in a time before there was any peg of (‘feminist’) doctrine upon which to hang her instincts for dignity and independence.

Akeel Bilgrami, philosopher

The most inventive novel I read this year was Carlos Fonseca’s Austral. Dazzlingly layered, it centres on a literary executor asked to complete the unfinished novel of a dying friend. What begins as an act of custodianship unfolds into a labyrinth of stories within stories, meditations on language, memory, history and war, as the narrator follows a trail of cultural devastation across Latin America. It has, rightly, been compared with Sebald and Borges. Austral braids archival fragments, history and characters into an unusual reckoning with modernity.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is everything it has been made out to be. Written with clinical precision, it follows young expats in Berlin who appear to inhabit the ideal life many aspire: free, tasteful, ethically self-aware and creatively fulfilled, mirroring the images they endlessly consume online. Yet the novel is, at heart, an account of the costs of this existence. Spare and incisive, Perfection portrays millennial cosmopolitanism as a mode of life in which the pursuit of perfection drains experience of genuine attachment, generating vulnerabilities of its own.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express

Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History by Rohit De and Ornit Shani is one of the most striking recent interventions in constitutional historiography. De and Shani challenge the familiar story that the Indian Constitution was shaped primarily by the brilliance of a few elite figures. Without denying their importance, the authors show that the Constitution also took shape outside the Assembly — through the actions, anxieties and aspirations of thousands of ordinary Indians who saw themselves not as colonial subjects but soon-to-be sovereign citizens. Drawing on an extraordinary range of archival sources, they reconstruct how people across regions, castes, professions and even the diaspora engaged the Constitution-making moment with remarkable imagination. They uncover thousands of unsolicited petitions and letters sent to the Assembly — even before it officially convened — reflecting what Amartya Sen once called the temper of “argumentative Indians.” These correspondents demanded mechanisms to recall errant legislators, abolition of the death penalty, and limits on executive emergency powers, among others. The book compels us to unlearn familiar myths and appreciate Constitution-making as a truly democratic, participatory process.

Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is a piercing and tender chronicle of the people, places and struggles that shaped her — not only as a novelist and essayist but as a fiercely engaged human being. Roy finds beauty in unlikely corners even as she exposes the violence and injustice hidden beneath celebrated national myths. At its heart, the book traces a life lived along the sharp edges of patriarchy, caste and religion. It is intimate — filled with memories of her childhood, her mother, her brother, and the fragile worlds of family — yet also marked by the ache of not fully belonging, of never having the conventional protections of “home.” She recounts with urgency how she discovered her voice, her language, and her political clarity, never treating success as destiny or applause as purpose. What stands out is not her rise to literary fame but her refusal to be seduced by it. For Roy, a writer’s task is to interrogate the world, grieve for it, fight with it, and imagine it anew — an act that remains dangerous to the powerful and indispensable to everyone else.

Anand Teltumbde, human rights activist

I’ve just finished Abir Mukherjee’s The Burning Grounds — always my favourite series of detective novels and particularly special now that I’ve walked the streets of the Kolkata he imagined a hundred years ago.

With the UK-India trade deal now signed, I’ve got a long list of more serious books to catch up on: the top two thought-provoking reads I’m looking forward to are: A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey by Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian; and Nicholas Stern’s The Growth Story of the 21st Century: The Economics and Opportunity of Climate Action. Both feel particularly relevant as we reflect on India’s remarkable journey and the global opportunities ahead. Also a shout-out to Sam Dalrymple’s excellent Shattered Lands.

Lindy Cameron, British High Commissioner to India

Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning Orbital is a luminous meditation on the fragility of our planet and of our shared humanity. Above all, it is a paean to the need to care for one another when trapped in a tiny space far above the earth where an accident can spell instant doom, and for our tiny (by galactic standards) planet which is the only home for all of us. Set over a single day aboard the International Space Station, narrated through the experiences of astronauts from six different countries, including those which have been on the opposite sides of the Cold War, Harvey’s prose lingers poetically between awe and melancholy, as the astronauts view Earth through their portholes, lightening and darkening through multiple sunrises and sunsets, and recalling significant memories of people down below. As a psychiatrist, I am reminded that the desire for connection, both with other persons and with our ecosystems, is a profound need, core to the human condition itself, without which we are left unmoored and drifting. Orbital ultimately affirms a simple yet radical proposition: that our well-being depends on recognising our interdependence — with each other, and with the only home slowly turning beneath us.

Vikram Patel, Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of Global Health & Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School

I tend to read several books at once, often moving between art, history and fiction, guided as much by curiosity as by conversations with artists and friends. This year began visually with Olga de Amaral, published by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. I encountered Amaral’s work in 2024 and wanted to understand the depth of her practice more fully. The book, beautifully produced as a hardbound, almost tactile object, is immersive, tracing her lifelong engagement with material, colour and scale, and the way her woven forms exist between art, architecture and ritual. That instinct to read across registers continues at present, with me reading The Mating Season by PG Wodehouse, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple and The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown all at the same time.

Jaya Asokan, director, India Art Fair

Why Geography Matters: A Brief Guide to the Planet by Nicholas Crane was easily the most absorbing book I read this year. Once I started reading it, there was nothing capable of distracting me. It explained why geography is not just a field of knowledge — grossly neglected in our system of education — but also a personal fact in the life of every man and woman. We all are shaped — intellectually and emotionally — by the geography of the places where we are born, grow up and live in. Caught up as we are in global concerns like climate change, we become passive actors in a grand drama of destruction because we forget the geography that shaped us.

The other book I want to recommend is Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. It is a blunt indictment of smart phones. Haidt is a psychologist who has studied how the smart phones affects the expected natural neural development of children’s minds. By the time they are 16, their impulse-control neuro-mechanism is seriously compromised by prolonged exposure to the
smart phone.

Krishna Kumar, author and former director, NCERT

Among the books I read in 2025, two stood out: The first is Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire by Anirudh Kanisetti — a wonderful history book on the Chola dynasty. Kanisetti is an excellent narrator who knows how to bring this medieval kingdom to life. One learns not only about kings and battles but also a lot about daily lives, role of women, very sophisticated relationships between the temples, the warriors and the merchants — a fascinating interaction that led to a powerful kingdom that reached well beyond the shores of Tamil Nadu. My takeaway: How strikingly different the societal organisation of a kingdom in South India in the Middle Ages is from what we consider a social contract. There is a good bit of art history and a lot of great stories. Now Thanjavur is definitely on my bucket list.
The second is Arundathi Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me. I am not particularly fond of memoirs but this one is breathtaking: Roy tells us about her youth in rural Kerala in the ’70s, with its beauties and bigotries, with family and friends. It is so well described that at some stage I felt being part of it! Her childhood was anything but easy — with an absent father and a very dominant mother. Roy’s depiction of the latter is maybe the best part. A difficult and harsh person, she is also a dedicated educator, determined and bold, an emancipated, empowered woman. I have never read a more convincing portrait of somebody with two very different faces. Both books are absolutely worth it.

Philipp Ackermann, German Ambassador to India

In each of the 11 short stories in Zahid Rafiq’s poignant book The World with its Mouth Open, he captures how everyday life unfolds in the shadow of unending conflict. Atmospheric, poetic, and sometimes absurd, the writing says as much in what is unsaid as in what is written.

Shilpa Gupta, Artist