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.
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wounded daughter of a literary critic, who is not only grappling with the loss of her father but also with the sheaf of unpublished poems he left behind.