The Hindu On Books newsletter | A Booker prize for Jenny Erpenbeck, Namita Gokhale’s new book, on James Bond’s creator and more

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. On the list for Political Writing Book Prize are Alpa Shah’s Incarcerations, Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Cat Bohannon’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad, Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence, Jason Okundaye’s Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap, Matthew Longo’s The Picnic, and Lyndsey Stonebridge’s We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. In reviews we read Namita Gokhale’s new novel, and two books which were shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, 2024, a biography of Ian Fleming and more. Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, attempts to decode the “enigma” who created one of the world’s best known fictional heroes, James Bond, an English secret agent who has had a huge impact on the culture of the 20th century and onward. “For instance, while the translators’ note is exceptional at highlighting the faultiness and challenges involved in attempting to translate a polyphonic work such as Mater 2-10, where the storytelling is hyper-local and both regions’ and characters’ names change frequently, the author meticulously centralises the notion of ownership, nationalism, and one’s duty in the face of challenging events, in a dialogic manner.” Jente Posthuma’s International Booker-shortlisted novel What I’d Rather Not Think About is the story of a faltering relationship between a brother and a sister, nicknamed One and Two, in which the latter meditates on grief that becomes an inseparable part of life when a loved one dies.