NEW DELHI: 2018 has a lot in store for booklovers – be it works by P Chidambaram, Omar Abdullah and Sheila Dikshit; biographies of Gauri Lankesh and Mohan Bhagwat; collected works of Manmohan Singh; V S Naipaul's essays on India or novels by Tabish Khair and K R Meera.
Autobiographies and biographies, however, seem to be the flavour of the season with scores of these being lined up for publishing.
While Rupa will publish memoirs by Montek Singh Ahluwalia besides biographies of Priyanka Chopra (Aseem Chhabra), Danny Denzongpa (by Priyanka Pereira) and Mohan Bhagwat (by Kingshuk Nag), Bloomsbury will bring out autobiographies of Sheila Dikshit and Yaswant Sinha besides a biography of Chandrababu Naidu (by Tejaswini Pagadala).
Among the other biographies are those of Syama Prasad Mookerjee by Tathagata Roy and Mahendra Singh Dhoni by Bharat Sundaresan (both Penguin); Indira Gandhi, Gauri Lankesh, S D Burman, Ilayaraja and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (all Westland); and Sanjay Dutt (Juggernaut).
HarperCollins India will publish a memoir of French President Emmanuel Macron, besides biographies of Karunanidhi and Zakir Hussain.
"We open our account for 2018 with Sheila Dikshit's innovative and well-researched pictorial book on Delhi's evolution as a city," says Bhaskar Roy, CEO of Palimpsest Publishers.
Hemali Sodhi, senior vice president (marketing) and publisher (children's) at Penguin Random House India, says the publishing house has a fabulous line up of books this year.
It will come out with books like "Small Acts of Freedom"
by Gurmehar Kaur; "The Book of Limericks" by Bibek Debroy; "Pakistan's Nuclear Bomb: A Story of
Defiance, Deterrence and Deviance" by Hassan Abbas; Pooja Bhatt's "Intoxicated! My Battle With the Bottle"; "Across the Universe: The Beatles in India" by Ajoy Bose; "Seven Decades of Independent India" by Vinod Rai and Amitendu Palit; "Happiness" by the Dalai Lama; and "Working With Difficult Emotions" by the Karmapa.
HarperCollins also has an elaborate list.
Some of its non-fiction titles include: "Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State" by Husain Haqqani; Devdutt Pattnaik's "The Book of Numbers: An Indian Perspective", Arun Shourie's "Anita Gets Bail: More On Courts And Their Judgments"; "The McMahon Line: 100 Years of the Sino-Indian Boundary Dispute" by J J Singh; and Sitaram Yechury's "The Idea of India: Past, Present And Future."
Its fiction list has Shweta Bachchan's debut novel "Paradise Towers", "Don't Tell The Governor" by Ravi Subramanian; Nikita Singh's "Letters to My Ex"; and "How I Became A Farmer's Wife" by Yashodhara Lal among other books.
Aleph's list includes Shashi Tharoor's "Why I am a Hindu"; Omar Abdullah's part memoir, part history and part analysis "My Kashmir"; "Strangers No More: New Narratives from India's Northeast" by Sanjoy Hazarika; "Indian Cultures as Heritage: Contemporary Pasts" by Romila Thapar; "Do We Not Bleed? Reflections of a 21st Century Pakistani" by Mehr Tarar; N Ram's "Why India Needs a Free Press" and "Pilgrim Nation: Journeys of the Spirit" by Devdutt Pattanaik.
Sister concern Rupa will publish "Villains of Bollywood by Annu Kapur", "Why I Killed the Mahatma" by Koenraad Elst, "Reinforcing Accountability" by P Chidambaram, "My Ministerial Years" by Manish Tewari, Bimal Jalan's "India 2025: A Great Leap in the Next Century", "Holding to Account: Inside India's Accountability Institutions" by Vinod Rai, and Kapil Sibal's "Shades of Truth".
Oxford's list of big books for 2018 include "The Aadhar Effect" by N S Ramnath and Charles Assisi; "Economics for Political Change: The Collected Works of Manmohan Singh"; and "Three Times Unlucky" and "The Idea of India" by Salman Khurshid.
Some of the upcoming titles from Westland Publications Ltd. are "Poonachi: The Story of a Black Goat" by Perumal Murugan; "Eating Wasps" by Anita Nair; a collection of poems in Urdu and English translation by Kaifi Azmi and Javed Akhtar's father Jaan Nisar; and Maxwell Pereira's book on the tandoor murder of 1995.
Juggernaut will publish books like Saurav Ganguly's "A Century is Not Enough", Benyamin's "Jasmine Days", "Half the Night Is Gone" by Amitabha Bagchi, "Pajamas are Forgiving" by Twinkle Khanna, and "Power" by Barkha Dutt.
Chandrahas Choudhury's "Clouds: A Novel", Boria Majumdar's "Eleven Gods and a Billion Indians:
The On and Off the Field Story of Cricket in India and Beyond", "AAP & Down: An Insider's Story of India's most Controversial Party" by Mayank Gandhi, and Keki Daruwalla's "Letters to Mamma: A Novel" are some of the books to be published by Simon & Schuster.