HT Editors pick their best reads of 2024

Dystopian novels, the autobiography of a theatre stalwart, a photographer’s turn to pastels, and books on AI, Dalit food, and India’s near east have all made it to this expansive collective reading list. Click on the link under each photograph to read that editor’s favourite book of the year

R SUKUMAR

Memoirs, Palestine, photo books and novels all make it to this year’s list of essential reads. (HT Team)

Editor’s pick: ‘Raising Hare’ by Chloe Dalton (HT Photo)

A busy professional adopts an orphaned leveret during the pandemic and in the process, learns more about the natural world, how humans interact with it, and what it does to us.

AMRITH LAL

Editor’s pick: ‘Before I Forget’ by MK Raina (Courtesy the subject)

A theatre stalwart’s recounting of his journey in a near dispassionate tone is contemporary history told in a subjective manner but without losing sense of the many layers that shape people’s experiences.

Editor’s pick: ‘Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada’ by Shahu Patole (Courtesy the subject)

Part cookbook, part social commentary and part anthropological exposition, this volume reveals the harsh truths of culinary discrimination but never slips into despair

LALITA PANICKER

Editor’s pick: ‘Martyr!’ by Kaveh Akbar (HT Photo)

Death and all its attendant horrors loom large over the book even as we come to grips with the protagonist, Cyrus Shams, an Iranian-American whose melancholy nature is compounded by his profound sense of loss

MANJULA NARAYAN

Editor’s picks: ‘Airplane Mode’ by Shahnaz Habib and ‘Chronicle of an Hour and a Half’ by Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari (Courtesy the subject)

From a biography of a pioneering anthropologist to a book on the wonderful old trees of India, another on the history of travel and a prize winning novel on a lynching, there was much to read this year

MEENAL BAGHEL

Editor’s pick: ‘On Consolation’ by Michael Ignatieff (Courtesy the subject)

A series of reflections on people who found themselves in an abyss, and used their traditions and personal beliefs to seek solace

PAROMA MUKHERJEE

Editor’s pick: ‘Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed’ by Sohrab Hura (Courtesy the subject )

This book of drawings by India’s youngest Magnum Photos member is as close as anyone can get to the author-artist’s eye, and is an invite into how his mind sees

RACHEL LOPEZ

Editor’s pick: ‘The Talk’ by Darrin Bell (HT Photo)

On the conversation Black American parents have with their kids to prepare them for a world that will be unkind to them because of the colour of their skin

RHYTHMA KAUL

Editor’s pick: ‘Own Your Body’ by Dr Shiv Sarin (HT Photo)

21 reassuringly narrated stories that present all that’s known about the liver, diseases related to it, transplant surgery, and cancer

ROSHAN KISHORE

Editor’s pick: ‘India’s Near East’ by Avinash Paliwal (HT Photo)

A history-in-progress that shows how colonial authority and anticolonial resistance, warfare and nationalism, partitions, and postcolonial state-building shaped India’s near east

VISHAL MATHUR

Editor’s pick: ‘AI Snake Oil’ by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (Courtesy the subject)

Decoding some tough realities about AI and how certain AI simply does not work as it is supposed to, or as advertised by tech companies

ZARA MURAO

Editor’s picks: ‘A Day in the Life of Abed Salama’ by Nathan Thrall and ‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch (Courtesy the subject)

A novel set in the near future and a work of non fiction set in Palestine both read like they are straight out of a dystopian nightmare

ZIA HAQ

Editor’s pick: The Incarcerations by Alpa Shah (HT Photo)

The inside stories of the ‘BK-16’, the 16 individuals arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case under a stringent law that allows indefinitely long periods of detention