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Rs 350). She spends a life too consumed by self-loathing to allow her husband to touch her,buried under her slowly spreading “subcutaneous duvet”,pretending not to overhear co-workers joke that her ass is big enough to have its own blog. Until the day her husband ups and disappears,after winning a mysterious amount at the lottery,and she goes off in search of him,to Los Angeles,and ends up conquering her own “obeast”. Much rings true about the little everyday embarrassments in the life of someone who’s morbidly obese: the different varieties of double-takes — from the moralistic what-must-she-eat to one that “suggested a comparative study”; the conspiratorial smiles of pregnant women. But the novel tends to heavy-handedness when it characterises Mary’s breath as “odour,fromage”,or says she’d blame the media for her body image issues,“but finger-pointing was too much exercise”.

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin (Hachette,

Rs 395),on the other hand,despite the heavy history it unfolds in,is a light,pang-filled pop song,addressed to Serey,a Khmer exile and musician,who Anne Greaves fell in love with in Montreal when she was 16. A decade later,she seeks him in Cambodia,only to lose him again. Anne’s poetic voice occasionally gets querulous and overwrought — “I have lived in intimacy with the violence of the untold life”. But this is more than made up for by the sensitive way in which she describes the horrific genocide and its aftermath: “People startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline,surrogate odours of torture and dead bodies and bombs.” And the equally brutal indifference of backpackers drifting through Phnom Penh,who “explored sex and skulls and temples,talked about going to the beaches in the south for New Year’s”. One person’s chilling tragedy; another’s atmospheric gloom.