One of our first reads this year, O’Farrell’s Hamnet (Hachette India), which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction last year, is the fictional retelling of Anne alias Agnes Hathaway, the wife of English writer William Shakespeare. Set in 1580s’ England, during the Black Plague, the book investigates the inspiration behind the Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet, which is said to have emerged out of a personal tragedy, the death of his son, Hamnet, to the epidemic. While this has just been a feverish speculation for years, O’Farrell’s novel makes it very real. 
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Price: Rs 699

Small Pleasures
By Clare Chambers

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Chambers’ novel has our heart. Reading it over two weekends, we were completely invested in the story of journalist Jean Swinney, 39, whose monotonous life, in London of the late 1950s, comes undone when she is put on a rather unusual reporting assignment. Gretchen Tillbury, who comes across an easily missable article in the paper in which Jean works on parthenogenesis—reproduction from an ovum without fertilization—writes in with a sensational claim: her daughter is a product of virgin birth. Jean, a single and unmarried woman, whose dreams of love and freedom are drowned by the burden of caregiving for an ageing mother, takes on the challenge, even if reluctantly. She hopes to uncover the truth, but at some point, she herself gets caught in a drama unfolding within the Tillbury family. Small Pleasures (Hachette India) is a potboiler, laced with a soft love story and a historic event that will completely change the lives of its characters.  
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Price: Rs 899

The Hottest Summer in Years
By Anuradha Kumar

Kumar travels back in time, with her period novel, The Hottest Summer in Years (Yoda Press). Set in post-Independent India, the book tells the story of Hans Gerder, a man with a fractured past living  in a small town in central India. It’s the early 1960s, and the country is still healing from the scars of Partition. Gerder finds love in young Lipsa, the daughter of his mistress Tilo, the wife of Raja Sahib. This innocent love is cut short by a most gruesome crime, involving perhaps, the Raja. The love story, spliced with a racy whodunit, is sincere at its best.  
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Price: Rs 599