The Hindu on Books newsletter | Nathan Thrall’s book on Palestine wins Pulitzer, Rushdie’s ‘Knife’ and more

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017 for his novel, cryptically called 4 3 2 1, the story of four lives, “made of the same genetic material.” In books, we read Salman Rushdie’s trauma memoir, Gurcharan Das on the perils of being a liberal in contemporary India, Percival Everett’s revisiting of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of Huck’s slave companion, Jim, and more. “Knife is dedicated to the many men and women who prevented Rushdie from dying and nursed him back on his feet, but the book is also a paean to his fifth wife Eliza, the gifted poet/novelist/visual artist.” Rushdie had been living in New York for two decades, moving from the U.K. to the U.S. after going into hiding there following Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa for The Satanic Verses in 1989. Gurcharan Das, the Harvard trained philosophy graduate who went on to head the global consumer goods major Procter & Gamble’s Indian unit before switching from life in the corporate fast lane to a career as a successful and celebrated writer and public intellectual, finds himself today on the horns of on existential dilemma, writes Suresh Seshadri in his review of The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal. The author traverses territory seamlessly from the definition of what he terms ‘a slippery word’ and its accompanying ideology, to the long-running Indian connection with the liberal temper manifest in the land of ‘330 million gods where none can afford to be jealous’.” Stepping into Huckleberry Finn’s world, Percival Everett has written Jim into being.