Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Fitzcarraldo Editions, ₹995)
From the Polish 2018 Man Booker International Prize winner, comes this crime noir novel. The story is set in a remote Polish village—a reclusive old woman’s dogs disappear and some locals are found murdered.
Frankenstein In Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (OneWorld, ₹941)
Following its translation (by Jonathan Wright) and publication on the bicentenerary of Mary Shelley’s original literary monster, the Iraqi author’s black comedy-cum-horror fantasy secured a spot on the shortlist of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
Everything Under By Daisy Johnson (Vintage Books, ₹900)
Writer Celeste Ng described this book as “weird and wild and wonderfully unsettling”. Twenty-seven-year-old Johnson’s follow-up to the short story collection Fen made her the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Melmoth by Sarah Perry (Serpent’s Tail, around ₹1,625)
Famous for The Essex Serpent, Perry revisits the 19th-century Gothic classic, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth The Wanderer, in this book, albeit with a touch of gender-bending. This darkly delicious novel explores moral reckoning and the postmodern condition.
House Of Screams by Andaleeb Wajid (Penguin Random House, ₹250)
Wajid’s eerie novel plays with the haunted house trope and creates an “echo chamber of mounting narrative terror”. An inherited old house and blood-curdling screams come alive in these pages—read after dark at your risk.
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss (Granta, ₹1,034)
Considered as the “best British writer never nominated for the Booker”, Moss’ latest will give you the creeps. The story of Silvie Hampton and her abusive father, who “likes dead things”, Ghost Wall addresses issues of gender and class, British identity and borders.