"The Beast Within" and "Black River" pose a shared question through the recurring symbolism of waste: whom does society deem fungible?

Told conversationally from the point of view of a child, this coming-of-age narrative set in the 1980s is a nostalgic homage to small-town life before the liberalization of the Indian economy and spans a period of roughly six or seven years in a place on the cusp of socio-economic upheaval.

Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe’s Father Cabraal’s Recipe for Love Cake, set across two timelines, one in the early-colonial moment of the late-seventeenth century and the other in the contemporary twenty-first century, explores the violence embedded in colonial food pathways and the indelible residue they have left upon postcoloniality.

What unfolds is a philosophical meditation on reality itself, on the merging of the real and the virtual, shaped through the contours of an unlikely friendship.

What this novel does superbly is that it takes its readers smack in the middle of village life and raises a few questions that continue to remain relevant after almost eight decades of freedom from the colonial yoke.

Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, in his second novel "The Menon Investigation", takes the trope of the detective novel but infuses it with a serious rumination on the nature of systemic corruption existing in the state and civic institutions.

Megha Majumdar’s timely tale, "A Guardian and A Thief", ponders the issue of memory and survival, of people and places, of food and the earth that yields it, or fails under duress to meet our needs.

Volga’s novella On the Banks of the Pampa, translated deftly by Purnima Tamireddy from Telugu, is situated in the milieu of the mythological era of the Ramayana, but is very much a text of the present times.