New Delhi: The big story of the year was how a young Harvard undergraduate of Indian origin, Kaavya Vishwanathan, got a half a million dollar advance for the book—How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.
But all that went downhill in April after charges of plagiarism. So, the world watched rather malicious in its glee, as the book got recalled and literature pundits predicted that Mehta would never live this down.
But then, there's no such thing as bad publicity, right? As Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf could tell you.
On a state visit to the US, he did the rounds, to promote his memoir In The Line Of Fire. And his promotion was rather funny, but in a controversial sort of way.
In many ways, the more understated Kiran Desai is the exact opposite. She had the outside odds, but won the Booker Prize this year for The Inheritance of Loss.
It was such an outside chance that Desai didn't even have a speech prepared, and famous writer mom Anita Desai wasn't even there at the ceremony. But predictably, the book's rocketed onto best-seller and critic's lists ever since.
Speaking of lists, here's CNN-IBN's take on the books of 2006. Journalist and author Raj Kamal Jha's Fireproof tops our list simply for his writing and the nightmares he'll leave you with, breathing new life into the Gujarat atrocities.
At the second spot is Vikram Chandra's huge 900-some page Sacred Games, equally gripping and intense - propelling the reader into the heart of Mumbai's underworld.
And William Dalrymple is an honorary Indian at heart, so his The Last Mughal comes third, for its meticulous research and for bringing Bahadurshah Zafar's Delhi to life.
Upamanyu Chatterjee stormed back on the scene with his sex-obsessed main character who's pretty much fallen through the cracks of society, in Weight Loss. And rounding off our top five, is Baby Halder with A Life Less Ordinary, for her sheer determination and an achievement against serious odds.
There's so much to look forward to in 2007. But perhaps, most of all JK Rowling's recently-named seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is not only eagerly awaited, but will also mark the end of an era, with two main characters dying.
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