Join our Instagram channel to discuss The Nod Book Club's book of the month as we read it. 

The Nod Book Club | Virtual | Fiction 

The Nod Book Club 

A virtual literary hangout where we handpick one unputdownable book every month

Absolute Jafar

Why ‘Absolute Jafar’ by Sarnath Banerjee is our July pick

About: Brighu is getting older. Badminton has replaced judo, irritation has replaced anger, metabolism has slowed down. Yet, some things remain: the inability to take a cab, anxieties about the digital universe and panic for the future. So Brighu walks. Unceasingly, through known and unknown terrains, with the pointlessness of a detective without a case.An Indo-Pak romance withstands years of toxic nationalism between two hostile countries, only to unravel in a third, in Europe. Jafar, born of that romance, inherits a history he has no control over. As he grows up in Berlin, his father, Brighu, desperate to hold on to the fantasies of a fading home, tells him bedtime stories: of sultans and jinns, of street food and eccentric cousins, of Delhi, Calcutta and Karachi.

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Absolute Jafar by Sarnath Banerjee

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Join our Instagram channel to discuss the book of the month as we read it. From every-thought-you-had-while-reading to the author's notes, there's a lot going on here. 

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Kiran Desai in conversation with Sonam Kapoor for The Nod Book Club

Getting Kiran Desai and Sonam Kapoor in a room to talk about 'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' (and then some) was pure magic. There was laughter, goosebumps, a few misty eyes—and everything in between. We couldn’t have dreamed up a better duo to kick off The Nod Book Club’s very first event.

About: When a California family relocates to the fictional college town of Greensbury, Vermont, for a year, each member finds themselves drawn into a world where folklore, imagination, and reality begin to blur. Miles, a scholar of Russian folktales, struggles to finish his dissertation, while his wife Kate, an English professor, grapples with illness. Their children, Olive and Wesley, forge unexpected connections with the natural world and their eccentric new community.&nbsp;Release date: 7 July, 2026

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Country People by Daniel Mason

About: Raj Ladlani is an unemployed actor convinced he's destined for greatness—even if the rest of Hollywood disagrees. Desperate for a break, he lands a job as the personal assistant to an eccentric and dysfunctional Hollywood power family, entering a world of absurd privilege, petty rivalries, and carefully guarded secrets. As Raj becomes entangled in the lives of celebrated director Jim H and his ambitious wife Anna, the lies that got him the job threaten to unravel spectacularly.&nbsp;Release date: 7 July, 2026

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The Simp by Roshan Sethi

About: In the exhilarating conclusion to Colson Whitehead's Harlem Trilogy, furniture dealer Ray Carney is once again tempted back into New York City's criminal underworld when financial pressures make one final score impossible to resist. Meanwhile, his formidable associate Pepper becomes entangled in the chaotic downtown art scene, as the city transforms in the early 1980s from gritty survival to glossy ambition.&nbsp;Release date: 21 July, 2026

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Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

About: Following the collapse of her marriage, a mother travels with her twelve-year-old daughter to Catania, Sicily, where they seek refuge in an apartment borrowed from a lover. As her own mother begins to lose her memories to dementia, she confronts profound questions about family, home, memory, and the stories that define us.&nbsp;Release date: 28 July, 2026

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Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli

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The Nod Book Club

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The author of ‘Hamnet’ gives us another indulgent family drama

Currently reading

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A book on Mumbai just won a James Beard Award

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With ‘Villa Coco’, the author of ‘Less’ takes us to Tuscany

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Why Patmeena Sabit took 10 years to write her debut novel 

Why ‘Good People’ is our June book club pick 

About: The Sharaf family is the picture of success. Successful, rich, happy. They came to this country as refugees with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. And now, after years of hard work, they live in the most exclusive neighborhood, their growing family attending the most prestigious schools. Zorah, the eldest daughter, is the apple of her father’s eye.When an unthinkable tragedy strikes, everyone is left reeling and the family is thrust into the court of public opinion. There is talk that behind closed doors the Sharafs’ happy household was anything but. Did the Sharaf family achieve the American dream? Or was the image of the model immigrant family just a façade?Release date: February 3, 2026

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'Good People' by Patmeena Sabit

‘Workhorse’ is more feral than ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ 

About: At the turn of the millennium, editorial assistant Clodagh “Clo” Harmon wants nothing more than to rise through the ranks at the world’s most prestigious fashion magazine. There’s just one problem: She doesn’t have the right pedigree. Instead, Clo is a “workhorse” surrounded by beautiful, wealthy, impossibly well-connected “show horses” who get ahead without effort, including her beguiling cubicle-mate, Davis Lawrence, the daughter of a beloved but fading Broadway actress. Harry Wood, Davis’s boarding school classmate and a reporter with visions of his own media empire, might be Clo’s ally in gaming the system—or he might be the only thing standing between Clo and her rightful place at the top.In a career punctuated by moments of high absurdity, sudden windfalls, and devastating reversals of fortune, Clo wades across boundaries, taking ever greater and more dangerous risks to become the important person she wants to be within the confines of a world where female ambition remains cloaked. But who really is Clo underneath all the borrowed designer clothes and studied manners—and who are we if we share her desires?Themes: Workplace drama, Ambition, New York high society

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'Workhorse' by Caroline Palmer

‘The Correspondent’ is Virginia Evans’s first novel—and also her eighth

About: Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.&nbsp;Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

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'The Correspondent' by Virginia Evans

Why ‘One Golden Summer’ is the perfect pick this February

About: Good things happen at the lake. That’s what Alice’s grandmother says, and it’s true. Alice spent just one summer there at a cottage with Nan when she was seventeen—it’s where she took that photo, the one of three grinning teenagers in a yellow speedboat, the image that changed her life.Now Alice lives behind a lens. As a photographer, she’s most comfortable on the sidelines, letting other people shine. Lately though, she’s been itching for something more, and when Nan falls and breaks her hip, Alice comes up with a plan for them both: another summer in that magical place, Barry’s Bay. But as soon as they settle in, their peace is disrupted by the roar of a familiar yellow boat, and the man driving it.Charlie Florek was nineteen when Alice took his photo from afar. Now he’s all grown up—a shameless flirt, who manages to make Nan laugh and Alice long to be seventeen again, when life was simpler, when taking pictures was just for fun. Sun-slanted days and warm nights out on the lake with Charlie are a balm for Alice’s soul, but when she looks up and sees his piercing green gaze directly on her, she begins to worry for her heart.Because Alice sees people—that’s why she is so good at what she does—but she’s never met someone who looks and sees her right back.

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'One Golden Summer' by Carley Fortune

19 years ago, she wrote a Booker-winning novel. Now she’s back with another contender

About: In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each becomes more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.Back in India, Sonia and Sunny's extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two—a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love.The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.&nbsp;Themes: Family saga, Immigration, Love

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'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' by Kiran Desai

Book Club

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Beyond the Book: Meera Ganapathi in conversation with Megha Majumdar

In times like these, picking Megha Majumdar's ‘A Guardian and a Thief’ as The Nod Book Club's December read was a no-brainer. To wrap up our last pick of the year, we got writer Meera Ganapathi to chat with Majumdar about climate change, why Kolkata anchors the novel, and the uneasy, fascinating questions that sit at its heart.Social Media Editor: Diya ParakhVisuals editor: Ria Rawat~Join our Instagram channel to read along with us: https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbaiNjee79flVG5f/More about The Nod Book Club here: https://thenodmag.com/book-club&nbsp;

The Nod Book Club

JULY PICK

Absolute Jafar

By Sheya Kurian

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