From the flashback folio

The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa, expertly translated by Edith Grossman, has Emma Bovary remade for our times in this infectious tale of tender love and cruelty.

The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt imagines the relationship between Srinivasa Ramanujan, the unschooled genius from Chennai, and G.H. Hardy, the Cambridge don. It is unusual and rewarding to find the Reimann hypothesis—zeta function, order of the primes, an infinity of zeros on the critical line—rendered into lucid literary fiction.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan is the horror story of bungled sex on a wedding night and the fractures of its aftermath. Unflinching in its gaze, the narrative achieves poetry out of banana skins and blood. Finally, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, without taking sides—left or right—chronicles and indicts the astounding stupidity, incompetence, and lethality of George Bush’s misadventure in Iraq.

(Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write together as Kalpish Ratna)

Siddhartha Deb

When I discovered the Chilean writer Roberto Bolano last year, I was astonished by the power of his fiction. This year saw the publication of his novel, The Savage Detectives, in English and I found it to be a genuine Third World epic: funny, tender, political, impassioned and brilliant. I was also impressed by the cerebral J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year. Part fiction and part philosophy, it is at all times a provocative handbook on democracy, the modern state, and the abuse of power.

I’ve also received immense pleasure from reading two unusual detective novels. David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero is a dark and gritty exploration of post-war Japan, glimpsed in the hallucinatory aftershock of defeat and nuclear devastation. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is more upbeat but equally accomplished. A wonderful hybrid of crime novel and alternate history set in an imaginary Jewish settlement in Alaska, it is tough-guy in tone and lyrical in style. Finally, I’ve read a remarkable debut novel, Lunatic in My Head, by Anjum Hasan, set in the north-eastern town of Shillong. Steeped in memory, loss, and desire, it marks the arrival of a wonderful new talent in Indian writing.

Mukul Kesavan, author of Men in White

Vikram Chandra is a writer of unusual powers: He makes worlds in which the most odd stories seem plausible. Sacred Games is a wonderful book: a metropolitan novel that combines a genius for invention with a real feeling for place. After reading a succession of Indian novels in which the ethnographies of provincial life stood in for fiction, it is good to read a writer who recognizes that novels are works of the imagination.

Ambarish Satwik’s Perineum: Nether Parts of an Empire—an album of grotesque colonial fictions—was a remarkable fictional debut.