Manjiri Prabhu
Voice of the Runes | Bloomsbury

A compulsive paperback reading tells you what’s exactly in store: a 36-hour spiral through history and myth, packed in the end-of-the world conspiracy mode, a la Dan Brown. Our protagonist, Re Parkar, allies with a handful of trustworthies to understand and uncover a Nordic mystery, taking the reader through its tasty intricacies.

Zarrar Said
Pureland | HarperCollins

An assassin lays out his motives for killing Nobel Prize-winning physicist Salim Agha—a man who makes a brilliant career in the West but gets only rejection in Pureland, his country which is taken over by ‘the Caliphate’. Said lays a cloak of make-believe on an unnamed Pakistan, and the treatment of Dr Abdus Salam (the book’s dedicatee) for being an Ahmadi. Said is a true inheritor of the fearless art of Moh­sin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif.

Sonali Dev
A Distant Heart | HarperCollins

The cosseted, precious daughter of a rich politician; the son of a policeman who died saving the leader, a boy now a servant in the house. The inevitable friendship (and more) is sparked, while comings, goings and ‘feelings’ are captured in chapters named after the protagonists and suffixed ‘present day’ or ‘a long time ago’. It is as if they stay in a vacuum though, for a pulsating Mumbai is absent.