Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize for ‘Orbital’, Aditya Iyer’s ‘Gully Gully’ and more

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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The Booker Prize for 2024 has been awarded to British writer Samantha Harvey for Orbital (Vintage). The slim novel recounts a day in the life of six astronauts who witness 16 sunrises and sunsets from their space station and reflects on life in the blue planet. Edmund de Waal, Chair of judges, said Harvey’s “book about a wounded world” was a unanimous choice in a strong shortlist of six books that included Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened,” said de Waal of Orbital. “Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.” In her review, Nandini Bhatia writes that Harvey offers a unique perspective in her novel, which concludes with a panoramic view of the “beautiful velvety poverty of man on earth that tips into the void”. The experiences will remind readers of the astronauts of the Boeing Starliner, currently stuck in space for months on end. “Harvey’s prose takes a pass at ‘man’s neurotic assault on the planet’. It asserts that in our relentless need to assert territorial authority and superiority, we do not spare space. We ‘must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day’.”

In reviews, we read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, a volume on the 2023 cricket World Cup, Richard Powers’ latest novel and more.

Books of the week

When Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point 25 years ago, it turned him into a best-selling author. How does his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point (Hachette India), compare with it and does he continue to find design in arbitrariness? In his review, Suresh Menon writes that Gladwell’s technique is to take two (or more) dissimilar stories and build a bridge across them with the surface brilliance of his writing. The strength of the book, he says, lies in the individual stories (which are interesting in themselves), and not in the connections between them. “Not how genetic uniformity among cheetahs is connected to the monocultural nature of an affluent community, but the dangers of monoculture itself; not why Harvard decided to field a women’s rugby team but how social engineering is possibly an activity of the establishment.” The Tipping Point, for all its flaws had a freshness and an element of fun. For Menon, Tipping Point 2.0 is the same mixture as before, but with the freshness gone. 

Richard Powers’s latest novel, Playground (Hutchinson Heinemann), longlisted for the Booker Prize, 2024, is about artificial intelligence and the oceans. The story is foregrounded in the discovery of the ancient game of Go, by two of the book’s four main characters, writes Mini Kapoor in her review. It’s nearing the end of the 20th century and the two men, Rafi and Tod, young students in Chicago, are smitten by the word game. Rafi, the bibliophile who will give up everything for a simpler life, tells Todd, the coding whiz who’ll become an AI pioneer: “If every atom in the universe was a little universe that itself had as many atoms as the entire universe had, the total number of atoms would still be smaller than the number of possible Go game states.” The drama – to play the game or not -- plays out amidst very human emotions: friendship, betrayal, love, revenge, redemption.

The Homeland’s an Ocean (Penguin) presents a meticulously curated selection of 150 couplets from Mir Taqi Mir, one of Urdu’s most revered poets. Translated by Ranjit Hoskote, the collection, enriched by an introduction that reads like a mini-biography of Mir, illuminates the life and times of an 18th-century poet who lived through one of the most turbulent periods in Indian history. In his review, Abdullah Khan writes that as a teenager, he saw Mir primarily as a poet of love and passion. “However, as I delved deeper into his work in my college years, I discovered that his poetry extends far beyond romance. His verses are deeply philosophical, subtly political, and spiritually rich, all the while upholding a secular ethos. Mir’s brilliance is evident throughout his work, justifying his title as the ‘god of poetry’ (Khuda-e-Sukhan).”

Aditya Iyer’s Gully Gully (Penguin) chronicles the journey of one of the greatest Indian white-ball sides ever built, that went on a nine-city pilgrimage around the country mesmerising supporters through the 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup. India ended up losing to Australia in the final, agonisingly. But in the years to come, the quality of the cricket is sure to supplant the disappointment in fans’ memories, and Iyer’s work will go a considerable way in facilitating that, writes N. Sudarshan in his review.

Spotlight

Three years after legendary architect Didi Contractor passed away, her student Lakshmi Swaminathan, has written A Call to Return (Banyan Tree), to celebrate her mentor who built with mud, stone, bamboo, slate, rice husk, cow dung and wood from deodar trees. Didi, who was raised as Delia by a German father and an American mother, had no formal training in architecture but she studied art and worked in theatre. She lived in Nashik and Mumbai with her Indian husband Narayan until they separated but her most iconic work was done in Kangra, her adopted home in Himachal Pradesh. Tiruvannamalai-based Lakshmi, who first met Didi in 2017, lived with Didi for four years and assisted her on several projects. In an interview with Chintan Girish Modi, Lakshmi provides insights into Didi’s philosophy and practice.

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• In Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport (Bloomsbury), Madeleine Orr writes about the threat the climate crisis poses on sport. The sport ecologist interviews athletes, coaches, politicians and leaders to learn about the consequences of climate change on a trillion-dollar industry, and how the sports world can fight back.
• Revolution Within: Nampudiri Women as Agents of Social Reform in Kerala (Tulika Books) by T.K. Anandi studies a key phase in the social reform movement of Kerala, during which a major transformation took place in upper caste, patriarchal Nampudiri households, initiated by women and the youth.
• Haruki Murakami’s new novel, The City and its Uncertain Walls (Penguin), revolves around a young man who is searching for his girlfriend who has mysteriously vanished. He searches for her in an imaginary city, after taking up a job in a remote library with secrets of its own.
• Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Classic Bengali Tales from the Sundarbans (Speaking Tiger Books), translated with an introduction by Tony K. Stewart, are enchanting pir kathas, or stories about Sufi saints, from early modern Bengal, which show how Hindu and Muslim religious traditions converged to create a syncretic culture.

Published - November 13, 2024 07:54 am IST