Listicle: 10 short reads to add to your list

Film and theatre star Pankaj Kapur’s authorial debut is about Jumman, the house-help and occasionally a friend of Amma Bi, an elderly widow, living alone in her ancestral Lucknow haveli. A haveli she is convinced is haunted, because why else would she hear footsteps every afternoon at exactly 3 pm? Enter Sabiha, a young lodger, whose presence transforms the life of a woman who thought her best years were behind her. Translated from the Hindustani by Rahul Soni.

Musa Okwonga is a true 21st-century Renaissance Man: Lawyer, podcaster, musician, football writer, author. His novella follows an unnamed narrator who moves to Berlin and realises that what haunts you in one place will follow you to another. The narrative mixes in magical realism and effortlessly covers the idea of being bisexual, Black and male. Via fear, loneliness, racism, and imposter syndrome, we are lead, eventually, to hope.

Reviewers are describing Nina MacLaughlin’s work as a book-length lyric essay. Huh? Think of it as a deep dive into the season by the Boston Globe’s books columnist. Winter, she finds, is when the impulse to honour and battle the darkness with light is the strongest. There are quiet contemplations about invisible worlds, meditations on grief, and glowing strands that connect us to who and what has come before.

Priya Hein’s adult debut Riambel, named after a small fishing village in Mauritius, is a lyrical coming-of-age herstory, shaped by fragments. Follow teenaged Noemi, who has to leave school to help her mother, a maid for one of the island’s richest, oldest white families. The story comes together through scraps of recipes, poetry, Creole slave songs, streams of consciousness, and an echoing ancestral chorus.

This is the story of Corina, Paola, and Marta, whose lives intersect in Paris in that special shared intimacy only possible in those early, reckless days of youth. Years later, Corina, settled in a Chicago she’d sworn she would rather die than return to, stumbles upon a long-forgotten letter. Sandra Cisneros’s bilingual novella merges the voice in the letter with a non-linear memoir, and prose poetry.

Open Water defies clear categorisation. Is it about young, heady, tender love between a London photographer and a dancer? Is it a snapshot of what it means to belong, to exist as a Black British man, in a society that expects you to be a certain way? Why not both? With this hypnotic, aching, piercing novella, Caleb Azumah Nelson has announced himself as a debut author to watch.

In Rodrigo Garcia’s story, a son bids goodbye to his larger-than-life, genius-but-unfailingly-human father—Gabo, known to the world as the Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The tale blends memoir and reportage, and in just a few pages, it offers a loving, honest, and often illuminatingly raw tribute to the legacy of Marquez and Mercedes Barcha, his muse and companion of more than fifty years.

Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell reunite to honour the small and large transformations (of our own lives, the world around us, the people in it) that occur when we read, imagine, and dream. Through four of Gaiman’s most popular essays, accompanied by Riddell’s illustrations, we are first urged, then inspired, to continue creating, no matter what. Why? Because it’ll never not matter.

This is the first volume of The Singing Hills Cycle and chronicles the adventures of Chih, a cleric entrusted with collecting stories before they’re lost, and his bird companion, Almost Brilliant. Nghi Vo’s richly realised world includes Rabbit, former handmaiden to the exiled Empress In-yo, who entrusts Chih with a tale otherwise buried under the dust of time and memory.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel in Italian is also the first personal work she’s translated. We follow an unnamed narrator for a year—to the pool, on walks around her house, over bridges, in parks, piazzas, stores, cafes, and eventually to the seaside where she’s struck by an epiphany that changes everything. This tiny book of connected vignettes distils Lahiri’s essence into a densely packed, glittering shard that heals as potently as it cuts.