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Wars of the words

What were the best selling titles of 2006? We find out...

PHOTO: SANDEEP SAXENA

JUST TO READ A woman leafs through `Shantaram' in a bookstore

Ask around in the city's bookshops for the books that sold best this year, and the honours seem to be evenly divided between William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss and Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram. The people in the business are never sure why some books do well and others don't.

But word-of-mouth publicity certainly makes a book move off the shelves. Of course a big prize helps. But only if it goes to an Indian author.

Ask Anil Arora, a book store owner, and he says, "When The Inheritance of Loss first came out, it was not selling well.

Now, it is doing brilliantly, courtesy the Booker Prize." On the flip side, the Man Booker Prize is no guarantee of sales. It has in the past, gone to "people who never sold".

Return of the prize

The Booker `returned' to India in 2006, and Indians feel a certain proprietorship, notes Anuj Bahri, who runs a store. "We look forward to it coming back. It's kind of like a personal possession." Bahri feels despite the fillip, Desai's book needs more time to pick up. It was certainly no help that in the first week after the declaration of the award, no copies were available.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is another story. Arora describes the usual winners as "minor Greek poets or political dissidents" whose work has largely not been translated into English. This time, it went to Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, but despite extensive media coverage, sales of his books have been lukewarm.

`Bestseller' is a misleading term in India, where print runs are small, point out booksellers. But beyond the hottest buys, Bahri assesses the year just ended as good for Indian writing. As a reader and as a bookseller, he has enjoyed the year. With his staff struggling to meet the demand, he declares the book of the year to be Shantaram, a novel about an escaped Australian convict who finds new meanings and new directions in the slums of Mumbai. Based on the intense experiences of the author Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram uses fiction to reveal the many facets of reality.

As does M.J. Akbar's Blood Brothers, an autobiographical novel covering three generations of the author's family that sets in perspective a chunk of modern India's history. Yet it seems Blood Brothers has fallen in the chink between history and fiction.

Only the good ones

A leading bookstore has sold at least 200 copies a month of Dalrymple. It could be the hype of a foreign author living in India. But if word of mouth and the cocktail circuit boost topicality, store owners feel a book will only last in the market if well written.

Jolly Sabharwal of another bookstore confirms the trend when she lists The Inheritance of Loss, The Last Mughal and Shantaram in order of popularity. Speaking of history, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford, says Arora, has been doing consistently well, as have Chetan Bhagat's books.

ANJANA RAJAN

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