Read This is a weekly post written by a guest author – often a friend of mine, or someone I’ve met on my writerly travels, who recommends three books that they think deserve more recognition. If you’re interested in buying any of the books, click on the covers and give these hidden gems some love.

Read This: Susmita Bhattacharya

Susmita, a friend and fellow author is in one of my writing groups. We meet every month to read each other’s work and comment on it, so I’m very privileged to get to read Susmita’s writing long before it’s even published. And I’m delighted that her choices come in South Asian Heritage month, which celebrates all things South Asian. Here’s a bit more about her:

Susmita Bhattacharya is an Indian-born writer whose debut novel, The Normal State of Mind (Parthian) was longlisted at the Mumbai Film Festival, 2018. Her short story collection, Table Manners (Dahlia Publishing) won the Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection and was serialised on BBC Radio 4 Extra. She mentors underrepresented writers through the Middle Way Mentoring Scheme and is co-founder of the Write Beyond Borders Mentoring Project and the ACE funded ‘Bridges not Borders’ project. She is a multidisciplinary artist who does several projects in schools and the community in the Solent region.

Follow her on Instagram or on X or Instagram. Here are Susmita’s recommendations:

Bombay Balchão by Jane Borges:

This is one of my all-time favourite novels. Set in Bombay (before it was renamed Mumbai), this novel could also be categorised as an interlinked short story collection. It follows the daily lives, loves and altercations of the residents in an apartment block in Cavel, a tiny Catholic neighbourhood on Bombay’s D’Lima Street. It weaves in history of the city and of course the recipe of the famous balchão, a prawn pickle or relish, introduced during Portuguese colonisation of Goa, and is a speciality of the Catholic community of that region.

I love this book because it reminds me of my time growing up in Mumbai, spending a lot of time with the Catholic community as my best friend is a Goan Catholic, and eating the delicious food her father used to cook. The drama and romance of living in a residential colony such as this one in Cavel is also something I relate to as well.

Borges captures the very emotion of Bombay; taking us through familiar streets and markets, docks and churches and weaving in the history of Bombay as well. There’s humour, pathos, romance, deception and so much more that it’s a wonderful way for me to revisit the city of my birth through her stories.

The Baby Ganesh Agency series by Vaseem Khan

One of my favourites in the cosy crime genre. One gets similar vibes to the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. It follows the adventures and misadventures of retired Inspector Chopra of the Mumbai police and his sidekick, a one-year-old baby elephant! With a wide cast of characters, from Inspector Chopra’s wife Poppy, dour mother-in-law to villains and Bollywood stars, murder and mayhem, this series is a fun ride with a baby elephant who helps solve cases and comes to the rescue whenever Inspector Chopra is in trouble. This series is a way for me to relax and take a deep dive into a world of crime and intrigue but with adorable characters such as the baby elephant!

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

Moving on from my Mumbai obsession, this is a book of essays by surgeon and writer, Atul Gawande, where he ‘explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable.’ (Goodreads) But this is so relevant to all of us. How do we strive to do better in the course of our own lives? This was the first book I read of Gawande’s and got totally hooked. I love reading nonfiction, especially of the medical kind and this book speaks to a layperson about his medical experiences and is immediately engaging, sometimes frightening but mostly uplifting and definitely gives me plenty of food for thought. I would recommend all his other books as well, particularly, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, and you can listen to him on BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures.

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All these sound wonderful but I cannot resist medical nonfiction, so Better is going straight on my to read list. Any appeal to you? Let me know in the comments. And if you’d like to be told about future Read This recommendations, you can follow me on Instagram, or subscribe to my newsletter.

More Read This: Books Under the Radar

Lou Morrish author of Women of War
Francesca Ramsay author of Pinch Me
Sarah Leipciger author of Moon Road
Tim Chapman university librarian
Juliet West author of The Faithful
Lindsay Hunter author of Hot Springs Drive
Gina Chung author of Sea Change