Top 20 Books to Make It a Great Year
Twenty books. Ten in Hindi, ten in English. New voices and timeless masters — handpicked for readers who believe a good book can genuinely change a year.
There’s a particular kind of magic that happens when you find the right book at the right time. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t show up on to-do lists but quietly reshapes how you think, feel, and move through the world. At Kitaab Paglu, that magic is what we chase — for ourselves and for you.
This year, we went deep. We asked our editors, our most passionate readers, and our bookseller friends one simple question: which book, if someone read it this year, would genuinely make their year better? The answers came from unexpected places. Hindi literature — both storied and emergent — turned out to be bursting with energy. English shelves, meanwhile, are holding some of the most honest, inventive writing in years.
What you’ll find below is a list of 20 books that span genres, moods, and languages. Some will make you cry on public transport. Some will make you annoyingly philosophical at dinner tables. All of them are worth it. Here’s to a year of great reading.
🇮🇳 हिंदी किताबें — 10 Hindi Picks
Established masters & voices redefining Hindi literature today
Raag Darbari
A masterpiece of Indian satirical fiction, Raag Darbari follows a young man’s arrival in a village near Lucknow — and his slow, comic reckoning with the absurdities of Indian bureaucracy, politics, and small-town life. Shukla’s prose is razor-sharp and achingly funny. If you’ve only ever read Hindi literature for its poetry, this novel will be a revelation.
Mujhe Chand Chahiye
The story of Varsha Vashishtha — a girl from a modest background with extraordinary ambition — who sets her sights on becoming an actress. It’s a dazzling portrait of desire, social class, and the theatre world. Surendra Verma’s writing crackles with life, and Varsha is one of Hindi fiction’s most unforgettable protagonists.
Dharti Abhi Bhi Ghoom Rahi Hai
Nasira Sharma is one of Hindi literature’s most respected living voices, and this novel — centred on Iran and its people — showcases her extraordinary empathy. A deep meditation on memory, displacement, and resilience. For the reader who wants fiction that travels across borders and genuinely moves them.
Lal Teen Ki Chhat
Usha Priyamvada’s quietly devastating novel of a woman navigating solitude, independence, and longing in a world that has little room for her kind of courage. Written with economy and grace, Lal Teen Ki Chhat is the kind of book you re-read and find it somehow different every time. An essential Hindi feminist text.
Pehla Ped
Vinod Kumar Shukla is a national treasure of Hindi letters — magical, unhurried, and utterly unlike anyone else writing today. His prose has the quality of a slow dream in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary. This collection of his work will make you want to walk outside, look at a tree, and feel something new about being alive.
Qissa Kotwal Saab Ka
Pankaj Mitra brings a sharp urban wit to Hindi fiction that feels bracingly fresh. His stories are set in small-town and mid-city India — in the gaps between aspiration and reality that most fiction skips past. This collection has drawn critical admiration for its colloquial rhythm and unflinching social eye. A must for lovers of the Hindi short story.
Ek Kutta Aur Ek Maina
A beloved collection of essays by one of Hindi literature’s finest intellectuals. Dwivedi writes about the seemingly insignificant — a dog, a myna, a walk through a garden — with a philosophical tenderness that lingers for days. If you’ve never read Hindi essays, start here. You will understand why the form is so loved in this language.
Hamara Shahar Us Baras
Mrinal Pande’s evocative novel reconstructs a city and its social memory — women’s lives, domestic interiors, the rhythms of collective living. It’s both intimate and sweeping, and it carries the particular texture of a world that is always on the verge of changing but never quite does. Rich, observant, essential.
Teen Ekant
Before Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand) won the International Booker, Geetanjali Shree was already rewriting what Hindi fiction could do. This collection of three novellas showcases her formally adventurous, deeply emotional storytelling. For the reader who wants to experience Hindi literature at its most alive and most daring.
Patang
Theatre director and writer Manav Kaul has a voice that is genuinely hard to categorise — somewhere between prose, poetry, and the texture of quiet grief. Patang moves through memory, loss, and the strange freedom of letting things go. Short, luminous, and utterly transportive. Read it in one sitting. You’ll want to.
“Hindi literature isn’t a niche corner of Indian reading — it’s a living, crackling universe. These ten books are your invitation in.”
📖 English Picks — 10 Titles Worth Your Time
From debut voices to celebrated authors — books that earn their place on your shelf
The God of Small Things
If you haven’t read this yet, this is your year. If you have, this is the year to re-read it. Roy’s debut remains one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking novels ever written in English — by an Indian or anyone else. The writing is prismatic. The story of Ammu, Estha, and Rahel will stay in your chest long after you close the book.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
A book about making video games, creative partnership, and the complicated love between two people who aren’t quite together but can’t be apart. Zevin writes about work and ambition and longing with a precision that is almost unfair. This was one of the most talked-about novels of recent years — and the talk was entirely deserved.
Demon Copperhead
A Pulitzer-winning retelling of David Copperfield set in Appalachian America, following a boy through the opioid crisis with wit, fury, and enormous tenderness. Kingsolver at the absolute height of her powers. You’ll be gripped, devastated, and ultimately grateful that this book exists. One of the finest American novels of this decade.
Fourth Wing
Yes, it’s a dragon fantasy romance. And yes, it is absolutely irresistible. Yarros built a world with its own rules, its own war, and its own achingly drawn love story — and readers worldwide have lost weeks of sleep over it. If you’ve been meaning to get into fantasy or just want something propulsive and fun, Fourth Wing delivers every single time.
Bewilderment
A widowed astrobiologist and his neurodivergent nine-year-old son navigate a world increasingly hostile to wonder. Powers writes about science, love, and loss with a tenderness that feels almost reckless. This novel will make you think differently about consciousness, about the earth, about what we owe to our children. Quietly extraordinary.
The Vegetarian
Han Kang’s Nobel Prize cemented what devoted readers already knew: she is one of the most arresting writers working in any language. The Vegetarian — the novella that first brought her to international attention — follows a South Korean woman’s quiet, inexplicable decision to stop eating meat, and its devastating ripple effects. Unsettling, beautiful, unforgettable.
Intermezzo
Rooney’s most mature and emotionally generous novel yet. Two brothers — one a chess player, one a lawyer — grieve their father in utterly incompatible ways while both stumbling into love. Rooney’s dialogue remains the best in contemporary fiction, and here she adds something warmer than in her earlier work. A beautiful surprise from a writer at her peak.
The Midnight Library
Between life and death, there exists a library containing every book that represents a life you could have lived. Nora Seed gets to try them. Matt Haig has written a novel about regret, possibility, and the quiet miracle of deciding to stay — and it has genuinely changed how thousands of readers think about their own choices. Warm, wise, and deeply needed.
James
A radical and riveting retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim — here renamed James — the enslaved man whom Twain’s novel reduced to a supporting role. Everett restores his full humanity, his intelligence, his inner world, in a novel that is both an act of literary justice and a page-turning adventure in its own right. Pulitzer-winning. Magnificent.
The Women
Following the extraordinary success of The Nightingale, Hannah returns with a sweeping story of a young woman who enlists as a combat nurse in Vietnam and comes home to a country that refuses to acknowledge her service. About courage, about memory, about the women history forgets. Hannah writes big emotional stories — and she earns every tear.
“The best English books of this moment aren’t escaping from reality — they’re finding new, braver ways to look at it directly.”
Twenty books is a lot to promise yourself. But here’s our real suggestion: don’t try to read all twenty. Pick three. Pick the one in Hindi that makes you a little nervous. Pick the English novel that sounds nothing like what you usually read. Pick the slim one you can start tonight.
The year doesn’t need to be defined by how many books you read. It can be defined by the two or three that genuinely got under your skin. At Kitaab Paglu, that’s what we’re always rooting for — not more books on your shelf, but more books in your bones.
Happy reading. We’ll be here with more lists, more recommendations, and the occasional loud opinion about why Hindi literature doesn’t get the international attention it deserves. Until then — किताब पढ़ो, खुश रहो।
