Courage under Fire
Suresh Narayanan
Penguin Random House
Pp 232, Rs 699
Courage Under Fire is a practical leadership logbook drawn from four decades of Suresh Narayanan’s own experiences of managing battles in the corporate trenches. Rather than offering abstract leadership theory, the book uses real episodes — across multiple countries — to show how leaders can navigate volatility with judgment, values and coordinated action. It argues that leadership is fundamentally human: built on trust, values, behaviour, credibility and outcomes.
The Trials of a Nation
Priya Jain
Penguin Random House
Pp 296, Rs 399
In this book, Priya Jain, founder of Finology Legal — a platform dedicated to making law and constitutional issues accessible to everyday Indians — examines ten defining moments that reshaped the relationship between the Indian state and its citizens and changed the course of the Republic itself. From the framing of the Constitution and the first general election to the trauma of the Emergency, the Republic has repeatedly been forced to confront its own limits.
Yeh Dil Maange More
Vishal Batra
Penguin Random House
Pp 200, Rs 399
A deeply inspiring true story of Martyr Captain Vikram Batra, Param Vir Chakra awardee and the face of India’s victory in the 1999 Kargil War, told through the eyes of his identical twin brother, the book carries the memories no history book ever captured. From the childhood days to the unbearable silence left behind after the war took one of them away, this is not just a book about battle — it is a story about love, loss, courage, family, and the price of patriotism.
Once Elephants Lived Here
Geetanjali Shree
Penguin Random House
Pp 224, Rs 599
There is an iconoclasm to Geetanjali Shree’s writing, especially beginning with this collection. Readers will soon learn that nothing is sacred to the author: narrative and genre conventions are summarily pushed off their pedestals and in their place we find… what? Entirely new ways of conceiving and presenting storytelling unfurl before us as we come to question our own rigid preconceptions of the short story genre.
The Red Badge
Rajesh R Varma
HarperCollins
Pp 376, Rs 599
Kerala, 1974. Rajesh, the
fourth-standard topper in a Malayalam-medium school in Tiruvalla, founded by his upper-caste Kshatriya ancestors, is excited to move to the big English-medium school there. But things go awry. Rajesh R Varma’s acclaimed first novel, Chuvanna Badge, now brilliantly translated as The Red Badge by the award-winning J Devika, is a searing account of the paranoia of caste privilege and the demons it births.