Mahesh Rao

I was having a perfectly normal reading year until March when India went into lockdown. From that week onwards, like so many others, I suffered a complete inability to focus on a book in any meaningful way. Snippets of news, statistics, memes, vague hopes and anxieties, all swilled around in my head. Nonetheless, I continued to pick up books before tossing them aside, confident that there was a remedial book for each of us, one that would lead us out of the swamp. I was lucky that I found mine sooner rather than later and I am immensely grateful to it. The Unfinished Palazzo (Thames and Hudson) by Judith Mackrell tells the story of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice and three women who owned it at different times: an eccentric and exhibitionistic Italian aristocrat, an English socialite and ‘professional mistress’, and the American art collector Peggy Guggenheim. The book was otherworldly enough to divert me from the rupture of lockdown, wholly engaging as a social history of Venice and a study of the relationship between artists and patrons, and, with its elegantly gossipy tone, not too taxing for my addled brain.

My favourite novel this year was Actress by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape), both for its exquisite prose and its nuanced exploration of the many facets of a mother-daughter relationship. The actress in question is a charismatic stage and screen star in Ireland whose mammoth influence both enriches and depletes her altogether different novelist daughter’s life. Steeped in the textures of film and theatre, the book brilliantly excavates a rich life through the prisms of fame, sexual power and family psychodramas.

The non-fiction that captivated me the most this year was Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (Vintage), a hugely powerful and moving account of America’s Great Migration, undertaken by millions of Black people in an attempt to escape the Jim Crow South. Wilkerson traces in warm and intimate detail the journeys made by three individuals at different times and shows how the Promised Land failed to make good on its pledges and brought us to where we are today.

A collection of short stories that I loved this year was How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Bloomsbury). The stories mostly focus on immigrants from Laos to Canada and the practical realities of life in a new country, without resorting to any nebulous musings on what it might mean to belong. Thammavongsa’s spare writing is wonderfully effective at tenderness, quiet humour and devastation; I read the stories through once and then returned to study them.

I gained so much pleasure from reading poetry this year. My standout experience was Arun Kolatkar’s cycle of poems, Jejuri (Rhus). Kolatkar swoops into this site of pilgrimage in Maharashtra, dedicated to Khandoba, in order to explore its architecture, landscape, faith, corruption and stillness.

There is such a wealth of unforgettable imagery and breathtaking language in these poems that I—never much of a pilgrim—was desperate to make my way to Jejuri and see it for myself.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the tightly controlled menace of Leesa Gazi’s Hellfire (Eka; translated from Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya). In this novel a woman emerges from the control of her family, wandering unaccompanied on the streets of Dhaka for the first time on her 40th birthday. Gazi alternates between the claustrophobia of her domestic life with this sudden and strange freedom, ratcheting up the tension and horror as we wonder what will happen when she gets home.

About The Author

Open