New stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, Elon Musk’s biography, Subramania Bharati in The Hindu and more

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. You can almost watch him go from being giddy and funny to being deeply in engineering mode and then suddenly the dark cloud happens – it’s almost like Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” We have begun reading the Booker Prize 2023 longlist -- the shortlist of six books will be announced on September 21 -- and this week we bring you reviews of Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s A Spell of Good Things and Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You; historian A.R. Venkatachalapathy talks about Subramania Bharati’s writings in The Hindu; and to mark Nutrition Week, we write about books that offer informed choices on food and well-being. Books of the week Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s second novel, A Spell of Good Things, which has been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023, is a contemporary story about two Nigerias, of haves and have-nots. In her review, Radhika Santhanam writes that as Adébáyò shows, “deep economic fissures may run through a society but they can never slice apart the lives of the rich and poor; the two worlds always interact in mostly obvious, sometimes imperceptible, and sometimes devastating ways.” Freedom from the circle of life | Review of Booker-longlisted ‘A Spell of Good Things’ by Ayobami Adebayo Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You is a set of eight interlinked stories on the migration experience in America.