The Hindu On Books newsletter: Pulitzer for Percival Everett's ‘James', reading Hanif Kureishi and more

The Hindu

06-05-2025

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2025, has been awarded to Percival Everett's James (Pan Macmillan).
Working with Mark Twain's 1884 classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Everett tells the story from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave.
Everett gives agency to Jim, as first, he takes up a pencil to write his tale, giving himself a new name — James; and then picks a violent route to get his freedom. If Twain's attempt to convey the contradictions of slavery came up short and 'problematic', as Everett has said in interviews, he fills the vacuum by telling the story from the other side. Read the review here. In reviews, we read a former top Facebook staffer's account of the company's reckless ways, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's new novel, Hanif Kureishi's memoir of his struggles after a fall paralysed him and more.
Books of the week
Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People (Pan Macmillan India) is a revelatory exposé of Facebook (now Meta) and its meteoric rise to global dominance, written by someone who was once in the inner circle. As a former Director of Global Public Policy, Wynn-Williams had a front-row seat to the corporate and political machinations that shaped Facebook into one of the world's most influential tools, and in many ways, its most reckless, writes the reviewer John Xavier.
'Within a few chapters into the book, you will know why Meta has tried to block the book's sale and bar the author from further promoting it. What Wynn-Williams offers is a darkly funny, shocking, and ultimately devastating portrait of a company that has irreversibly transformed how people interact, communicate, and perceive the world—often for the worse.'
In 2022, writer Hanif Kureishi had a bad fall in Rome. The spinal cord injury meant he could no longer 'walk, write or wash himself', and struggled to accept his new reality as a patient. But throughout his medical journey – he eventually returned to London where he is based – he dictated a 'series of despatches' to his family. The drafts were then revised and expanded into a profound book, Shattered (Hamish Hamilton). In his review, Chintan Girish Modi writes that the memoir is the story of Kureishi's determination 'to keep writing' and draw sustenance from words. 'In doing so, he has created a book that will give courage to the hopeless and evoke empathy in the cold-hearted.'
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count (Fourth Estate) tells interlocking stories of four women in the U.S. — Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer; Zikora, her lawyer-friend; Kadiatou, her Guinean housekeeper; and Omelogor, her acerbic banker-cousin. Through these stories, Adichie explores middle-age experiences, womanhood, class, and immigration. In her review, Radhika Santhanam calls it an 'extraordinary, expansive novel' though it is not a perfect book -- 'the feminism is so old-school that men are boring at best and abusers at worst. It also fizzles out towards the end.' But, says Santhanam, Adichie is a master storyteller who simply dazzles and hypnotises with her satire, wit, and prose. 'And for that reason alone, this novel that was 10 years in the making is well worth the wait.'
Spotlight
In continuing Israel strikes on Gaza, 16 people died on Sunday including at least three children. Israel resumed its military offensive in Gaza in March after a two-month shaky truce in its war against Hamas which began after the Palestine military outfit's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Gaza's health ministry, news agencies report, has said over 2,000 Palestinians have died since March, and the overall toll has gone past 50,000. Three weeks into the bombardment of Gaza in 2023, Canadian-Egyptian writer and journalist Omar El Akkad had tweeted: 'One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.'
The tweet went viral, and he picks the title of his new book from it. One day, everyone will have always been against this (Penguin) is a memoir and a reappraisal of Western liberal values – all 'lies', he contends. More importantly, he wonders aloud why the world and powerful powers are allowing the slaughter in Gaza to continue.
Akkad writes that one of the hallmarks of Western liberalism is an assumption, in hindsight, of virtuous resistance as the only polite expectation of people on the receiving end of colonialism. 'While the terrible thing is happening – while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed – any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilisation.' In Gaza, the horrors, he says, have been meticulously documented by Palestinians, and meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the Western world.
He points out that Gaza has led to a fracture – 'a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.' But as the Vietnam War – the country celebrated 50 years of the end of the war and reunification of north and south on April 30 – and other wars have shown, the only antidote to indifference and silence is astute documentation of horrors inflicted on fellow human beings.
Browser
Caste in India is mostly reported from the experience of the oppressed. Caste as a privilege is not understood well. Ravikant Kisana documents the lives, concerns and crises of India's urban elites, framing the 'savarnas' as a distinct social cohort, oblivious of its own social rules, privileges and systems in Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything (Ebury Press).
(Ebury Press). In 2013, Puja Pabari, not a cricket fan, married ace batsman Cheteshwar Pujara, and witnessed firsthand the life of a player. In her memoir, The Diary of a Cricketer's Wife (HarperCollins), written with Namita Kala, she reflects on what it means to be a cricketer's wife in India, and the triumphs and struggles to be a player.
(HarperCollins), written with Namita Kala, she reflects on what it means to be a cricketer's wife in India, and the triumphs and struggles to be a player. Lindsay Pereira's Songs Our Bodies Sing (Penguin) narrates the tale of a heartbroken father in London who turns to the Beatles to make sense of what he has lost. Other characters too turn to music to understand their world. The stories are set at points of intersections between the east and west – and the commonalities they share rather than differences.
(Penguin) narrates the tale of a heartbroken father in London who turns to the Beatles to make sense of what he has lost. Other characters too turn to music to understand their world. The stories are set at points of intersections between the east and west – and the commonalities they share rather than differences. Once Upon a Beginning: Incredible Origin Stories from India (Hachette India) by Nalini Ramachandran are tales passed down through generations by indigenous communities from different parts of India. The collection of rare and untold creation myths piece together the mysteries of life and evolution.