10 Indian Books List

Times Now used World Book Day on April 23 to publish a 10-book reading list focused on Indian titles released between 2021 and 2025. The roundup, updated at 9:33 a.m. Indian Standard Time, was written by Girish Shukla. (timesnownews.com) The list is framed as a corrective to the way Indian literature is often filtered through writers based outside India. Times Now says its 10 picks come from authors “working inside the country,” often in languages other than English. (timesnownews.com) Two of the clearest signals in the selection are translation and history. Times Now highlights Geetanjali Shree’s *Tomb of Sand*, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, and William Dalrymple’s 2024 history *The Golden Road*. (timesnownews.com); (bloomsbury.com) That emphasis tracks with the calendar and the wider books conversation. UNESCO marks World Book and Copyright Day on April 23 each year, and Rabat was named World Book Capital for 2026 in an announcement made on October 8, 2024. (unesco.org) Shree’s place on the list carries extra weight because *Tomb of Sand* won the 2022 International Booker Prize. The Booker Prize says it was the first book originally written in any Indian language to win the award, and the first Hindi novel recognized by it. (thebookerprizes.com) Times Now also points readers to Aanchal Malhotra’s *The Book of Everlasting Things*, a 2023 debut novel by the New Delhi writer and oral historian. Google Books describes Malhotra as co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory and identifies the novel as her first fiction book. (timesnownews.com); (books.google.com) Another thread in the roundup is the afterlife of older Indian-language work through new English editions. Penguin Random House India says *Our City That Year* by Geetanjali Shree was first published in Hindi in 1998 and later issued in Daisy Rockwell’s English translation. (penguin.co.in) The mention of Manu S. Pillai places narrative history alongside fiction and translation. Penguin Random House India describes Pillai’s recent *Gods, Guns and Missionaries* as a political and cultural history tracing the forces behind modern Hindu identity. (penguin.co.in) What the list does, in practical terms, is narrow a huge market into a shelf-sized set of names, dates and genres. On a single day tied to UNESCO’s reading campaign, it steers readers toward books published from 2021 to 2025 rather than older Indian classics or diaspora staples. (timesnownews.com); (unesco.org) The result is less a canon than a snapshot of where recent Indian publishing is drawing attention: translated fiction, big-history nonfiction, and contemporary writers based in India. For readers updating their shelves in 2026, that is the lane Times Now chose to map. (timesnownews.com)