Indian authors in NYTs notable books of 2014

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.”

Indian historian and writer Ramachandra Guha makes it to the list with “Gandhi Before India.”

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.”

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 Beauty”.

“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.”

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.