Two writers. Two 2010 favourites

One of the two writers (from a short-listed six) below could well be the winner of the first DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and take home the $ 50,000 prize money when it's announced at the Jaipur lit fest on January 22, 2011. We asked them what their most memorable book of the year was.

One of the two writers (from a short-listed six) below could well be the winner of the first DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and take home the $ 50,000 prize money when it's announced at the Jaipur lit fest on January 22, 2011. We asked them what their most memorable book of the year was.

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Neel Mukherjee: A Life Apart

Damon Galgut's In A Strange Room, a moving, unflinchingly honest series of three long short stories about the first-person narrator's restless wanderings in search of a place, both spatial and emotional, called home.

Tania James: Atlas of Unknowns

I don't often traffic in hardcovers, but Maggie Pouncey's Perfect Reader was well worth the weight. The novel follows the charmingly witty, wise but wounded daughter of a literary critic, who is not only grappling with the loss of her father but also with the sheaf of unpublished poems he left behind.