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Word war
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What were the best-sellers of the year gone by?
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PHOTO: SANDEEP SAXENA
JUST TO READ A reader browses through Shantaram
Ask around 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.
No guarantee
Anil Arora, a bookstore owner, says: "When The Inheritance of Loss first came out, it was not selling well. Now, it is doing brilliantly courtesy the Booker Prize." However, the Booker is no guarantee of sales. It has in the past, gone to "people who never sold".
It "returned" to India in 2006, and Indians feel a certain proprietorship, notes Anuj Bahri. "We look forward to it coming back. It's kind of like a personal possession." But he thinks Desai's book needs more time to pick up. The Nobel is another story. Arora describes the usual winners as "minor Greek poets or political dissidents". Despite extensive media coverage, Orhan Pamuk's books are not exactly flying off the shelves.
`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 well as a bookseller, he has enjoyed the year. He declares the book of the year to be Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts's novel about an escaped Australian convict who finds new meaning and direction in the slums of Mumbai. Based on the intense experiences of the author, 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.
A leading bookstore has sold at least 200 copies a month of The Last Mughal, William Dalrymple's biography of Bahadur Shah Zafar.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.
ANJANA RAJAN
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