If you are usually a fan of reading nonfiction books but are considering exploring more fiction books, The Bombay Circle Books has some recommendations for you. These books will help you learn about various topics while using fascinating stories as vehicles for information.
The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier
Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here—like the glass, the island’s maestros spend their lives learning to handle. Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men. But perfection may take a lifetime. Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola as she hones her craft through war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss. The beads she creates will adorn the necks of empresses and courtesans from Paris to Vienna—but will she ever earn the respect of those closest to her? While this book has elements of magical realism, it is set against Venice’s colourful history and has fascinating insights into glassmaking.
The English Problem by Beena Kamlani
When eighteen-year-old Shiv Advani is handpicked by Mahatma Gandhi to study law in England and return as a leader of a liberated India, he leaves home reluctantly—newly and hastily betrothed, a wife he barely knows already carrying their child, and a life laid out for him by duty rather than desire. But London upends everything. Drawn in and repelled in equal measure, Shiv enters a world shaped by the Empire. Its culture, privilege, and seductive freedoms slowly pull him away from the mission he came for as the people Shiv sought to be liberated from become the people he desperately wants to be a part of. As he trains at the Inns of Court and begins to carve out a new life, the distance between his two homes widens. Soon he is caught between loyalty and longing, tradition and transformation, two homelands, two identities, and two futures. In the end, Shiv must fight not only for his country’s liberation but also his own.
The Complete Maus Art Spiegelman
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times). Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us. If you enjoy memoirs this is a touching fictionalised version of a harrowing time in modern history.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind. This book explores a colonial feminist history of the Caribbean.
Nonfiction books can provide in-depth information about niche topics but fiction provides a unique lens through which you can understand them. These are some of the best fiction books for people who usually read nonfiction. Follow The Bombay Circle Press bulletin for more book recommendations.