Nuggets: Book Marks

Book Marks
The Crossword Book Awards shortlists are out. (You can see the entire list at crosswordbookstores.com.) We asked a few people from the book world who they were backing. Fiction looks like a toss-up between Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (with not much backing for Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence). Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Nights and Sudeep Chakravarti’s Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country lead the betting in non-fiction.

And for Indian language fiction in translation, Manto’s Selected Stories, translated by Aatish Taseer, looks like being a clear winner. An unofficial poll on Facebook agreed on the Manto, gave Poppies a clear lead in fiction, and threw up a surprise non-fiction leader: Chaturvedi Badrinath’s The Women of the Mahabharata. The winners will be announced on July 23, at Mumbai’s Nehru auditorium.