Santanu Bhattacharya's 10 Favourite Books of all Time

Friends in Small Places by Ruskin Bond, Penguin

I read avidly as a child, but looking back, this is the book that stands out. It is a collection of vignettes, each about a character who has left a lasting impression on the author. It beautifully evokes the sense of a small Himalayan town, of friendships forged with strangers along the path of life. As with Bond, the writing is simple, but the relationships hardly are.

English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee, Faber & Faber

Agastya Sen is from the privileged circles of Delhi. When he cracks the civil service and is posted in a provincial town, he undergoes a journey of self-discovery and reckoning with his surroundings. This book mirrored my youth—a rebellious phase when I was acerbic about everything around me, impervious to my own shortcomings, and was gradually coming to terms with real life.

Trying to Grow by Firdaus Kanga, Penguin

Another teenage read that shaped me. Brit is a young boy with a physical condition. He lives with his mother in 1970s Bombay, and all is well until an attractive young man moves in next door. Way ahead of its time, this book explores desire, sexuality and disability in the most sassy and raucous ways.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, Dial Press

Another collection of vignettes, this time the stories of staffers of a newspaper in Rome. From the ageing proprietor to the remote stringer, every character is an integral part of the publication but still feels out of place in a world struggling to hold up a dying business and its ethics. This book, to me, is the absolute opposite of its name—pure perfection!

Out of Place by Edward Said, Vintage

I read this memoir when still quite young, and it was my awakening to the Palestine issue. Said, who was an intellectual and is widely read for his academic texts, writes eloquently about his childhood, family, home, then the loss of it, and the despair of living in exile.

The Years by Annie Ernaux, Seven Stories Press

Another autobiography, but this time not of a person but of the world she grew up in. Written in the collective first person ‘we’, Ernaux traces major events and milestones of her life and the world over the last several decades in prose that is expertly concise and unrelentingly truthful.

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell, Picador

In this collection of loosely-connected stories, a young, gay, American professor is trying to find love, sex and community in faraway Sofia, Bulgaria. In feather-light prose, Greenwell delivers the most hard-hitting punches of this alienating existence.

Goodbye to Berlin by Christoper Isherwood, Vintage Classics

A young man turns up in 1930s Berlin with dreams of writing a novel, and so unfold the stories of a delectable cast of characters around him. But the world they live in is changing, and the Nazis are showing their true colours. Will their city survive, and, if so, at what cost? Insightful, forensic and lots of fun, this novel also has one of my most favourite characters in literature—Sally Bowles!

My Brilliant Friend quartet by Elena Ferrante, PRH

Elena Greco is a young girl in working-class Naples. Her best friend is Lila, but they couldn’t be more different from each other. Tracing their lives and friendship and the community around them over six decades, this magnum opus fleshes out each character so well that I still think of them as real people I know.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, Riverhead Books

A middle-aged professor loses her friend to suicide, and inherits his dog. Woman and beast are now stuck in a small New York apartment, trying to coexist reluctantly, both steeped in the memory of their dead dear one. A meditation on grief, loss and unlikely companionships, this book is on top of my ‘forever’ reading list.