Chiki Sarkar is the Editor-in-Chief of Random House India. The views and ideas expressed in this piece are her own
I've been on holiday and caught up on all kinds of books I've been meaning to read. Here are my recommendations:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy: The Road is a kind of parable (think Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker), set in the future where the world has become a barren wasteland - most people have died, there is virtually no food, and the few survivors have become violent cannibals in desperation.
Through this terrain, walks a father and his young son, trying to reach the coast while they keep away from marauders, scavenge for food, and protect themselves as best as they can from the cold and rain. It is a spare, intense story and as readers we follow the pair and pray, against all odds, that they survive.
It's the father-son relationship - tender and extraordinary moving - that is the beating heart of the story. McCarthy is one of the most important American writers of his generation and The Road, which won the Pulitzer, is a classic.
Aleksander Hemon: Hemon, like McCarthy, is another writer I've always meant to read and finally got around to. To my mind, he's the most interesting writer in English of his generation. Hemon's biography has always caught people's interest and it's worth repeating here. He was a Bosnian who was visiting USA when the war in Yugoslavia broke out. He couldn't return home and stayed on in the country, eventually becoming an American citizen.
Till that point Hemon had only basic English but in a few years he was writing stories for The New Yorker. I've read his last two books back to back - The Lazarus Project and Of Love and Other Obstacles (a collection of short stories published this year) - and both allude to Hemon's biography playfully. The narrators, like him, are Bosnians in America, often truculently so; the short stories are an elaborate, often digressive, homage to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Conrad, like Hemon, was an East European whose second language was English).
But apart from the intellectual play, the European antecedents, the unusual subjects he writes about (Bosnia during the war and after), Hemon's great gift is in the writing. It's wild and often startling, beautiful, savage and black. His first collection of stories, The Question of Bruno, is on my list as well.
And finally, I succumbed with the rest of the world and read Twilight. Really enjoyed the first, and wished I had read it as a fifteen-year-old. It's Romeo and Juliet mixed with vampires, and cleverly done - after all who could have quite imagined that the two could co-exist? No wonder all the teenage girls love it.
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