June Reading List: 5 Books To Get You Back To Reading
Skip the doom-scrolling, and pick these reads to make your June more enjoyable
There is something quietly rebellious about reading these days. It’s almost a secret act, an indulgence not broadcast on social media,(although it used to a thing back in the days) not hurried through between meetings or endless scrolling.
In a world that’s always talking — loud, fast, everywhere — to sit down with a book is to reclaim a small, deliberate corner of silence. To be honest, reading books, especially fiction, is one of the most personal activities you can do for yourself.
It’s not about checking a box or racing through the latest bestseller to appear cultured. It’s about lingering in a sentence, savouring a phrase, letting a story settle in the bones like a slow drink of whiskey on a rainy evening.
Reading, in this spirit, demands a kind of patience and attention that feels nearly extinct, as if it’s a secret society whose members are scattered and rare. About showing up for yourself in a way that the day-to-day — emails, notifications, the relentless noise — doesn’t allow.
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This June, as the monsoon rains drum steadily against the windows of cafes and homes across India, it’s the perfect moment to slow down and reclaim the kind of reading that feels like a conversation with an old friend. Books that don’t just fill time but fill you up. That remind you why words matter, why stories hold power, why silence can be loud.
So this is an invitation, not just to read, but to read well. To seek out the books that challenge, soothe, surprise — books that fit into the quiet moments between the chaos. Because the Esquire man, after all, is not just about style on the surface but the depth beneath it. And in these pages lies a guide to the kind of reading that feeds that depth.
Upcoming Books Releases
So, here are few upcoming releases that you should on a look out for this June:
Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal
Release: 16 June 2025
An Observer Best Debut Novel for 2025, Saraswati by British Indian Gurnaik Johal is a novel that is deeply ambitious, epic tale which is yet intimate and beautiful collection of seven stories which span the globe but all of which connect back to India.
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Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and Making Of Modern Asian by Sam Dalrymple
Release: 19 June 2025
In Shattered Lands: The Five Partitions and Making Of Modern Asian, Sam Dalrymple explores the many partitions , not just Indian, that have left a deep scars across South Asia.
Dalrymple's narrative spans the Bengal famine, the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the overlooked cleavings of Burma and Sri Lanka.
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhashti
Heart Lamp that recently won an International Booker Prize award for 2025 and is the only short story collection to ever win a Booker prize. In Heart Lamp In Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India.
The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel by Jeet Thayil
Release: 23 June 2025
Jeet Thayil's The Elsewhereans is a genre-defying novel that melds fiction, travelogue, memoir, a ghost story, a family saga, photographs and much else into a tale that unfolds across continents and decades.
From the backwaters of Kerala to the streets of Bombay, Hong Kong, Paris and beyond, Thayil maps the restless lives of those shaped by separation - both the ones who leave and the ones left behind.
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A hypnotic meditation on migration, loss, and the fragile threads of identity from one of the most brilliant voices in contemporary literature, The Elsewhereans is a novel of retrieval and reinvention - an elegy for vanished worlds, and a reckoning with the histories we inherit.
Night In The Hills by Manav Kaul
Release: 17 June 2025
Translated by Pooja Priyamvada from Hindi Manav Kaul's upcoming novel Night In The Hills is rich with human stories of grief, passion, loneliness, first love and emotions that defy explanation. One feels as if these people have moved in and out of their lives at some point in time.
In one story a tourist is baffled by his taciturn companion on a dark and scary night in the hills. Two teenage boys compete to win a girl’s heart, the old-fashioned way, through letters.
Another a woman aches to find a way out of an extra-marital affair that is going nowhere. A middle-aged man ponders the little details of his first love affair from the confines of a hospital bed.