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.

The year resonated with several new voices, apart from Adiga and Hanif. They got a boost with publishers further widening the scope for new forms of writing. Amruta Patil’s Kari added to the growing strength of graphic novels in India and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape, her debut novel for adults, to the number of sci-fi. There was Karan Bajaj (Keep off the Grass), Anuja Chauhan (The Zoya Factor) and Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan (You are here). The first two books are going to be made into films. Blogger Madhavan’s book, on the other hand, failed to whip up much interest despite marketing overdrive. Chetan Bhagat’s The 3 Mistakes of my Life suffered a similar fate. Hello, a film based on his One Night at Call Centre flopped too.

“It’s been a year of some wonderful new writing, with our mass market list doing exceedingly well and several very topical non-fiction titles such as our books on Chandrayaan, on the Olympics and China, getting us attention,” says Karthika. Author-artist Manjula Padmanaban too feels that new forms of writing have been enjoying encouragement from publishers as well as a growing number of readers. She, however, wishes that “there could be a balance in the number of people reading high and popular literature”.

Amidst all the interest generated by English writers, regional literature has been making its presence felt with translations getting more support. “Titles from regional literature are found in bookstores now,” says Meera Godbole-Krishnamurthy of Zubaan. This apart, Penguin India made sure that bibliophiles get their dose of nostalgia by reprinting a number of old titles like Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve and Firdaus Kanga’s Trying to Grow.