For Indian bibliophiles, 2008 was dotted with ecstasy, delights and some disappointment

For those who are hooked to books, 2008 provided enough opportunities to raise a toast to the achievements of Indian writers. The high point, of course, was Aravind Adiga winning the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel The White Tiger in October.

“It’s certainly been the most exciting year of my career as an editor/publisher. To have a Booker-prize winning book on the list is every editor’s favourite fantasy,” says V K Karthika, head of Harper Collins India. Sayoni Basu, the director of Scholastic India, was equally ecstatic. “The White Tiger was reason for immense celebration across the country. And there was the new Amitav Ghosh, which I loved,” she says.

Ironically, Adiga’s win created one the biggest disappointments of the year. For, Amitav Ghosh’s most ambitious work so far—Sea of Poppies, the first of his Ibis trilogy spanning 200 years — was left behind in the Booker race. Novelist-poet Priya Sarukkai Chabria found the Sea of Poppies “very intellectually stimulating and the play of language fascinating, while Adiga offered a gripping tale”. Salman Rushdie’s much-awaited The Enchantress of Florence didn’t garner in the awards but offered a delightful prose to his many fans.

Jhumpa Lahiri stayed put on both Indian and US bestseller charts. Unaccustomed Earth by this second generation American sold over 40,000 copies in India, spelling huge success for Random House India (RHI). The second taste of success for the publishing house came with Mohammad Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes. “The amazing thing about Jhumpa was to see an established author break her track-record and emerge more popular than ever. Her first-year sales of Unaccustomed... were much higher than The Namesake and Interpreters of Maladies. Hanif was the opposite: here was an utterly new voice and a radically different novel, and that’s what made it special,” says Chiki Sarkar, editor-in-chief of RHI.

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