May fiction: Six new novels and short story collections to cool down with in summer

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04-05-2025

All information sourced from publishers.
Songs Our Bodies Sing, Lindsay Pereira
A heartbroken father in London turns to the Beatles to make sense of what he has lost. An antique dealer in Bombay rejects jingoism in favour of racism. Two immigrants in Toronto look for ways of belonging with a local rock band. And, in Paris, a tourist rejects long-held ideas about trust.
The East and West have clashed in innumerable ways since each first acknowledged the existence of the other. The stories of Songs Our Bodies Sing are set at these points of intersection. What they reveal are commonalities rather than differences, with protagonists on opposite sides of an imaginary divide, trapped in boxes of their own making.
My Name is Jasmine, Shashi Warrier
A woman wakes up confused in Malkangiri District Hospital in Odisha. When a nurse wants to know her name, she blacks out in terror at the realisation that she has no idea who she is.
The next time she wakes up, the terror returns, but she wills herself to look at her world more rationally. She discovers she's suffered a head injury and lost some of her memories in the aftermath. When the police come, she finds out that she knows more about guns and violence than any common citizen should. Floating voices in her head tell her: trust no one, keep to yourself, you've been through worse and survived.
When a psychiatrist is brought in to find out whether she's faking her amnesia, she's inclined to trust him.
Her fingerprints lead the police to believe that she is part of a group that's planning a major operation soon. While the investigating agency fears that her former colleagues might try to have her killed before she can testify.
Deciding that she needs legal help, the psychiatrist calls in a former Supreme Court advocate. Given the concern and support from the psychiatrist and the lawyer, Jasmine is torn: should she give up her group that supported her when she had nowhere else to go? Or these two people, who believe in her when no one else would?
Age of Mondays, Lopa Ghosh
Ten-year-old Narois wakes up to find that her mother is preparing to go to a mysterious place – a place neither too far nor too close. It is a motherless Monday. The first of many.
As Narois's father struggles to adapt, as her parents' marriage comes apart, as Narois herself tries to make sense of the goings-on – is her mother having an affair; is she planning to abandon the family forever? – she creeps away into the dark, magical-real Jahanpanah forest to escape. Here, she encounters the Jugnus – legendary healers and weather-workers. Silver Samir, their handsome leader, Mian Pagla, who followed the river, Kochi who is bendy when sad, and Velu the gentle murderer mesmerise Narois with their tales; she will do what she can to belong to them.
It is a world on the brink, where the mother Narois leans on may be unable to protect her and where betrayal can be love in disguise.
One More Story About Climbing a Hill, Devabrata Das
In 'A Night with Arpita', a beautiful young girl in a train compartment captures the imagination of the writer – but he is unable to fathom the reason for her melancholy until it is too late. In 'Ananta with His Seema', three apparently disconnected incidents take place on a railway platform. Descriptions of the incidents are interspersed with passages from a letter written by Ananta's friend, which lays bare his helplessness in the face of injustice and the loss of his youthful ideals.
In the eponymous story, life imitates art with a disastrous twist. A young couple treks up a hillside to recreate for themselves the experience of two characters in a love story set in idyllic Shillong. But the beauty of the pine shrouded hills is marred by extremist violence and their climb to the top of the hill has an unforeseen, macabre end.
Each of the eighteen stories in this collection provides an insight into life in an area of conflict, told with irony and ingenuity.
The Dead Know Nothing, Kishore Ram
Disgraced after failing the seminary exams, Thankachan has returned to his old life. On Fathima Island in the Ashtamudi archipelago, his days are clouded over by the fear of never making anything of himself, but soon, strange events begin to happen on the island. A dead body surfaces one day, then another. Soon, a murder case considered solved years ago is suddenly once again wide open. Is his evasive brother involved in something sinister? Is the fate of a fisherman's son really sealed at birth?
Packed with intrigue, compelling characters draw the reader into their lives and the heart of the dark secrets that have long lain dormant. Once revealed, they threaten to shake the foundations of community life and wreck Thankachan's hopes for the future.
Water Days, Sundar Sarukkai
At the cusp of the millennium, in a fast-changing neighbourhood in Bangalore, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi form a buzzing background of muted conversations as speculation mounts about what really happened that night when a girl barely out of her teens died. Raghavendra, erstwhile security guard dreaming of setting up his own grocery store, finds himself unexpectedly in the middle of it all, tasked with the responsibility of finding out the truth by his wife Poornima. And every morning, for the thirteen days that it takes for the soul to find liberation and the story its resolution, the women gather at the water taps before sunrise, collecting water and stories …