On the shelf:  Memoir, geopolitics, and global health issues

Explore new literary releases spanning intensely personal memoirs of identity and captivity.

Unflinching Memoirs, Himalayan Geopolitics, and the Roots of India’s Lifestyle Diseases
Unflinching Memoirs, Himalayan Geopolitics, and the Roots of India’s Lifestyle Diseases

Tell My Mother I Like Boys

Suvir Saran
Penguin Random House
Pp 240, Rs 699

From Delhi to New York, Suvir Saran plated joy while swallowing shame. In this uncompromising reckoning, he strips away the gloss of celebrity to confront the double life beneath it—the family silences, the cultural bargains, the illnesses weathered, and the cost of refusing himself. The result is a narrative alive with appetite and peril—raw, exact, and unsentimental. Saran chronicles a boy too afraid to speak becoming a chef who reshaped Manhattan’s understanding of Indian cuisine.

HOSTAGE

Eli Sharabi
Penguin Random House
Pp 208, Rs 699

In this stark, unflinching account, Eli Sharabi recounts the 491 days he spent captive in Gaza’s tunnels after being torn from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri. Enduring starvation, violence, and crushing isolation, Sharabi offers a rare and deeply human perspective on survival under extreme duress. Through it all, Sharabi charts the emotional terrain of captivity with rare clarity—his longing, his faith, the camaraderie formed among captives, and more.

In the Margins of Empires

Akhilesh Upadhyay
Penguin Random House
Pp 328, Rs 499

The book documents the lives and livelihoods of the borderlands in the Eastern Himalayan region—Nepal, Bhutan, pre-1950 Tibet and the post-1950 Tibetan Autonomous Region, Sikkim, Darjeeling, and India’s Northeast. The book is an effort to look at the region as an organic whole, from within the region, connected through centuries of transboundary traders, travellers, scholars, monastic exchanges, but also by missionaries, monks, and moles.

SICK NATION

Karan Sarin
Wyzr
Pp 312, Rs 599

Why are lifestyle diseases like diabetes and heart disease reaching epidemic proportions among Indians, despite our best efforts to live healthily? What is the common thread driving multiple, seemingly unrelated chronic conditions? Karan Sarin reveals the single hidden driver behind these conditions—insulin resistance—and explains how the mismatch between our genetic legacy and modern abundance turns our survival mechanisms against us.

Business Beyond Borders

Dean Foster
Hachette
Pp 288, Rs 2,199

The book explains culture through the real-life stories of the author, resonating and bringing the cultural challenges inherent in global work to life. From negotiating with Bedouins in Libya, to managing a team of Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro, from out-running an earthquake during a presentation in Mexico City, to losing a government ‘handler’ in Beijing, each of the stories illustrates a critical cultural issue that global man-agers need to understand today.

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This article was first uploaded on December six, twenty twenty-five, at twenty-seven minutes past six in the evening.
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