Books have a way of sparking conversations, changing perspectives, and lingering long after the last page. At Esquire India, our editors are always reading something, whether it's a much-hyped new release, a forgotten classic, or a nonfiction deep dive we can't stop recommending.
This is a snapshot of what's currently on our nightstands, office desks, and e-readers, and the books we're talking about around the office. Consider it a reading list from the Esquire team to yours
I’m reading Trust, which had been on my TBR long before Hernan Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize. It got bumped up the list when I heard it was the book that brought Dua Lipa and Callum Turner together. A lit fiction-pop culture crossover for the ages!
Told in four parts, through four distinct perspectives, it’s a remarkable feat of storytelling. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a novelist wrestling with capitalism this much since Ayn Rand.
—Sonal Nerurkar
If you've ever read Katie Kitamura's books, you'd know better than to expect the expected from her writing. In Audition, she's examining the multiple roles we play in relationships, from the point of view of a theatre actress. She meets a man young enough to be her son for lunch, and from there begins the performance of a lifetime. This book will have you rethink every 'role' you've ever played, making you wonder if you truly know the people you know.
—Saurav Bhanot
Nolan has said that Wilson's opening line—"Tell me about a complicated man"—was a major inspiration for his interpretation of Odysseus.
I'm reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, the version that inspired Christopher Nolan's upcoming adaptation. What immediately stands out is the clarity of the prose. Wilson strips away the grandiosity that often surrounds Homer, replacing it with a more direct and remarkably alive writing for the modern reader.
The odd timings of the ongoing FIFA World Cup 2026 mean many in the Indian subcontinent are losing out on plenty of sleep as they try to stay on top of the footballing carnival. But where live TV stumbles, books thrive. In Eduardo Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow, I have found my perfect footballing companion for the month. The Uruguayan journalist and writer describes the game through stories of superstition, heartbreak, tragedy, luck, heroes and villains. Galeano, who died in 2015, celebrates the glory of a game that still retains its magic in the modern world. As one review rightly noted, it is truly sport’s answer to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
— Nitin Sreedhar
A motherless boy, an irresponsible guardian and an extremely complicated coming-of-age. I'm reading The Captain and The Enemy by Graham Greene. It's a battered copy that I acquired from Delhi's Sunday book bazaar. Though this isn't Greene's finest by any standard, the English novelist's widely loved appetite for cynicism shines through in this bumpy exploration of the emotion we know as love. I also found echoes of two of the finest (and among my favourite) exponents of the English-language novel in The Captain and The Enemy—Donna Tartt and Charles Dickens.
—Prannay Pathak
A soldier, a widow, and a lifetime of impossible choices. I'm reading Flesh by David Szalay, whose spare, elegant prose turns an apparently simple life into something quietly profound. Beginning with a young Hungarian man and expanding into an exploration of class, power, sex, and ambition, the novel's emotional weight emerges through observation.
—Rudra Mulmule
When you're reading about political figures, you tend to see them as a culmination of their politics and actions. How Prime Ministers Decide by Neerja Chowdhury does away with all that. You start with six decisions that shaped India as we know it today. From there you unravel the six Prime Ministers behind these decisions, till you are left with these utterly human individuals—their joys, sorrows, hopes and heartbreaks. I may not agree with all their choices, but it was refreshing to set judgement aside for a while and simply understand them as people. Maybe even empathise with them, which, when you read this book you realise just how much this world needs right now, irrespective of political standing.
—Aditi Tarafdar