Washington: Works of five Indian-American and one Indian author figure among 100 Notable Books of 2014 selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
Delhi-born Indian-American author Akhil Sharma’s novel “Family Life†figures in the Fiction & Poetry section. “Sharma’s novel, deeply unnerving and tender at the core, charts a young man’s struggles to grow within a family shattered by tragedy and disoriented by its move from India,†Times said.
Books in nonfiction include “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End†By Atul Gawande, an American surgeon, author, and public health researcher.
The book is described as “A meditation on living better with age-related frailty, serious illness and approaching death.â€
Indian historian and writer Ramachandra Guha makes it to the list with “Gandhi Before India.â€
The Times noted “It was as a young lawyer in South Africa that Gandhi forged the philosophy and strategies later put to such effect in India.â€
Indian-American writer Vikram Chandra, winner of 1996 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, is included for “Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beautyâ€.
“With great subtlety and depth, Chandra, who is both a novelist and a programmer, traces the connections between art and technology,†says the Times.
American author and journalist Anand Gopal’s “No Good Men Among The Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes†takes “A devastating look at how we got Afghanistan wrong.â€
In “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas†by American author and newspaper columnist Anand Giridharadas, “competing visions of the American dream collide in this account of a post-9/11 hate crime and its unlikely reverberations,†according to the Times.