Sayantan Ghosh

It’s almost Christmas but despite the title of the book this column is recommending today, don’t expect your usual year-end cheer from this one. These loosely connected stories shadow the same troubled protagonist – and he’s one who belongs on the fringes of society, the one we love to overlook – a drifter, an addict, an eternal outsider.

Sadness has rarely felt as personal or powerful on the page as it does in Max Porter’s life-affirming Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Longlisted for the Guardian first book award and winner of the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize, this is heartache masquerading as a slim book.

The raging debate of this past week - polarising the entire country - has been about the latest blockbuster film from Bollywood, depicting a violent and disturbed man's unabating love for his father, a film I personally felt was nothing short of vile. That instantly made me want to write about a book which showcases that even painfully distraught father-child relationships can survive in this world without being entirely joyless. 

In fragmented, episodic chapters, Jenny Offill seamlessly delves into the stream of consciousness of a modern marriage and parenthood. Book critic John Self wrote in his 2014 review: “A book this sad shouldn't be so much fun to read.” I remember my mid-20s heart being instantly sold.

We are dropped at the centre of a dreamy 1950s Paris, full of flaneurs, delinquents, raconteurs, and runaways. Our gloomy hero Daniel Brodin is introduced to us while he's attempting to steal a book from a bookshop. It's the kind of opening you expect from a film by Jean-Luc Godard, not a novel.

Yellowface has become a global bestseller since it released in May 2023, and I’m certain a film adaptation is already on the cards. Someone wrote on the internet that this book is the cringiest thing they’ve read in quite a while, but like it is with all good cringe material they couldn’t resist it or put it down.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s third collection of stories following her Pulitzer-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies, in 1999 and Unaccustomed Earth in 2008, is a lilting portrait of lives in and around Rome – flitting between feeling at home and away at once.

Last month, several visual artists, writers, and publishers released statements of solidarity with Palestinian author Adania Shibli, after a ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair at which Shibli was to receive a prestigious award was called off in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Let’s make no bones about it: Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke is definitely going to ruin your day, and perhaps your week too. It’s triggering, alarming, disturbing, often nauseating, but so consistently engaging that you won’t be able to keep it away.

No one in their rational mind can support the barbaric killing of innocents, whether in Israel or Gaza. But the argument being presented from several quarters that Palestinians are going to lose the sympathy of the world for the 7 October Hamas attacks begs the question – what use has this sympathy been to the Palestinian people in all these years?