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Sunetra Choudhury picks her favourite reads of 2025
The final volume of a well researched and readable biography of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and a brave book that records what it is like to endure unspeakable grief
If there’s one genre of literature that’s lagging in India, it’s that of a good biography, especially political ones. There have been fascinating characters in our public spaces but very few honest, well researched and readable biographies of them by Indian authors. I’m happy to report that Abhishek Choudhary’s second and final volume of his biography of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Believer’s Dilemma, was the most enjoyable account I have read this year. If the first volume told us about the early life of the founding member of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the first Prime Minister to emerge from it, the second one picked up on more recent times, behind-the-scenes details of his prime ministerial years and then, his long period of ill health. Choudhary manages to give us intricate details of Vajpayee’s personal and public life without looking like a fawning groupie or an overtly critical memoirist. For instance, what was it like at 7, Race Course Road for Vajpayee and his foster family of Namita and Ranjan Bhattacharya, and how did Vajpayee negotiate his relationship with the Kauls? It’s not just these personal details that are touched upon. The reader also learns about what really went on in the BJP during the Babri Masjid demolition, the coming together of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and Vajpayee’s gradual rise to the post of Prime Minister. Don’t be intimidated by the thickness; this is a delicious, fast paced book.
My other recommendation is Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow. I ordered the book as soon as I heard about it and consumed it obsessively. The author writes about the suicide of both her sons, one a few years after the other. Every mother’s ultimate nightmare, this brave book records what it is like to endure that unspeakable grief and how she processed it; how she made peace with it. It may be too much for many readers but if you were moved by Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, this book is for you. I also found it enlightening on how to make yourself useful to those who are grieving – what’s OK to say, what’s not; is it OK to just let people grieve by themselves or should you be there even if they insist they want to be all alone? They say that writing about experiences helps your brain cope with trauma. Yiyun Li has done a great service by documenting her excruciating pain, giving her readers life lessons they all wish they never have to learn.
