The Nod Book Club 

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

A Guardian and a Thief

Why you need to read ‘A Guardian and a Thief’ by Megha Majumdar  

About: In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe.Themes: Climate change, Family saga, DisplacementRelease date: October 31, 2025

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'A Guardian and a Thief' by Megha Majumdar 

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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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A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

Beyond the Book: Parmesh Shahani in conversation with Mahesh Rao

We get attached to our books—and Mahesh Rao’s 'Half Light' was particularly hard to let go of. So, to process this novel's emotional whiplash, we got writer Parmesh Shahani to chat with Rao about queer clichés, why Ahaan Pandey and Taha Shah are their dream leading men, and whether a sequel might be lurking in Rao’s drafts.&nbsp;&nbsp;~Join our Instagram channel to read along with us: https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbaiNjee79flVG5f/&nbsp;More about The Nod Book Club here: https://thenodmag.com/book-club

About: It’s 1985, what will soon become known as “The Year of the Spy,” and fourteen-year-old Peter Bennett is convinced his mom’s new boyfriend is a Russian agent. “Gary” isn’t in the phone book, has an unidentifiable European accent, and keeps a gun in the glove box of his convertible Porsche. Peter thinks Gary only wants to get close to his mom because she works at Scientific Atlanta, a lab with big government contracts. But who is going to believe him? He’s just a kid into BMX and MTV.&nbsp;But after another woman who works at the lab is killed, Peter recruits an unlikely pair of allies—a has-been pulp writer and muckraker named Dennis Hotchner and his drag performer buddy and heavy, Jackie Demure. Both soon become the target of an unhinged Russian hitman (Is it Gary? Maybe!) with a serious Phil Collins obsession.&nbsp;Meanwhile, Sylvia Weaver, a young, Black FBI agent, investigates Scientific Atlanta in the wake of the employee’s murder and discovers a nest of Russian spies in the Southern “city too busy to hate.” Little does she know her investigation is being thwarted by a seriously compromised colleague in Washington, D.C., who is in league with a lovesick, hypochondriac KGB defector who is playing both sides of the Cold War to his benefit.&nbsp;As Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev prepare for a historic nuclear summit in Geneva, what happens in Atlanta might change the course of the Cold War, the twentieth century, and Peter Bennett’s freshman year of high school.Release date: 2 December, 2025

‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World‘ by Ace Atkins 

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About: Lexi Villiers is a 29-year-old Englishwoman doing her medical residency in Hobart, working too hard, worried about her bank balance, and living with friends. It's an ordinary, happy kind of life, and getting even better, because as the dawn is breaking on New Year's Day, Lexi is about to kiss the man she loves for the very first time.&nbsp;But by midnight, everything will change. Because Lexi is in fact not an ordinary young woman. She is Princess Alexandrina, third in line to the British throne—albeit estranged from the rest of her family and living in voluntary exile on the other side of the world. But following a terrible accident which has claimed the life of her father and her twin brother, Lexi—the black sheep of her family and, until this moment, always destined to be the spare—is now the heir apparent, first in line to the throne once her grandmother, the elderly Queen, dies. Called back to do her duty, she arrives in London to a Palace riven with power plays and media leaks, all the while guarding painful secrets of her own, not knowing who she can trust.&nbsp;Themes: Royalty, Family saga&nbsp;Release date: December 2, 2025

The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage - December 2025

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'The Heir Apparent' by Rebecca Armitage 

About: Andi Zeigler lives a double life. By day, she’s the no-nonsense, steadfast personal assistant to the Prime Minister of Canada’s wife. By night, she slips out of her heels and writes romance novels under a top-secret pen name. But when her steamiest book, The Prime Minister &amp; Me, unexpectedly becomes a bestseller, rumors of a real-life affair between her and the PM start swirling out of control.&nbsp;Enter Nolan Crosby, the PM’s new close protection officer (aka bodyguard) – and Andi’s failed one-night stand from three years ago. Nolan’s in town very temporarily to care for his mother, who’s battling early-onset Alzheimer’s. But when the scandal erupts, Andi ropes him into a fake-dating plan.&nbsp;As loyal employees, they’ll pretend to date for the summer, just long enough to put the scandal to bed and save their boss’s reputation. In an unexpected plot twist, Andi and Nolan discover that keeping their romance strictly fictional might be easier said than done.&nbsp;Themes: Romance, Fake Dating&nbsp;Release date: December 2, 2025

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'The Bodyguard Affair' by Amy Lea 

About: A woman settles in a remote Polish village where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech—was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history, but a cosmology.&nbsp;Release date: 2 December, 2025

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones  

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'House of Day, House of Night' by Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones 

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A Booker is life-changing. Three past winners reveal how

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The Nod Book Club

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The 2018 ruling on section 377 sowed the seeds of ‘Half Light’ 

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For bold, boundary-pushing books, look no further 

A Guardian and a Thief Megha Majumdar The Nod

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This book, set in a climate-ravaged Kolkata, is Oprah-approved

Why ‘Half Light’ by Mahesh Rao is our November pick 

About: In the misty mountains of Darjeeling, a landslide entraps the guests and staff of a dilapidated hotel. Cooped up inside, two men exchange lingering glances. For carefree Neville, this is one of many exhilarating encounters, stolen kisses in stairways and parked cars. But for Pavan, an employee desperate to avoid detection, their entanglement prises open his carefully contained and solitary existence with unforgettable consequences.Four years later, their paths cross again amidst the towering skyscrapers and ghostly smog of Mumbai. Pavan has fled the hills, burying all memories of their encounter, while Neville is now a flailing graduate, craving something more than the naked torsos blowing up his phone. When he glimpses Pavan working behind the reception of a luxurious hotel, he demands a meeting, pursuing him with mischief and menace as the secrets of their time together threaten to tumble into the light.Themes: LGBTQ+ romance, IdentityRelease date: October 31, 2025

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'Half Light' by Mahesh Rao

Why ‘Help Wanted’ by Adelle Waldman is our October pick 

At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before customers arrive. When a golden opportunity for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement―among them a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging to her “cool kid” status from high school, a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together and set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot into motion. A darkly comic workplace caper that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, Help Wanted is a deeply human portrait of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living.&nbsp;

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'Help Wanted' by Adelle Waldman

Why ‘Real Life’ by Amrita Mahale is our September pick 

About: In the remote Mahamaya Valley in the Himalayas, wildlife biologist Tara has vanished. Hunting for answers, Tara’s best friend Mansi sets out to retrace her whereabouts in the days before her disappearance. The prime suspect Bhaskar sits in police custody, his obsession with Tara laid bare, his testimony a labyrinth of contradictions and half-truths. As the investigation deepens, the valley reveals its own mysteries—a backpacker paradise where the timeless and the ephemeral collide, where technology and nature clash, and where a woman's voice can be silenced in countless ways.Themes: Friendship, Feminism, Indian society

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'Real Life' by Amrita Mahale

Why ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ by Shelby Van Pelt is our August pick

About: After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

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'Remarkably Bright Creatures' by Shelby Van Pelt

Silvia Park is not convinced we can handle artificial intelligence

In a reunified Korea of the future, robots have been integrated into society as surrogates, servants, children, and even lovers. Though boundaries between bionic and organic frequently blur, these robots are decidedly second-class citizens. Jun and Morgan, two siblings estranged for many years, are haunted by the memory of their lost brother, Yoyo, who was warm, sensitive, and very nearly human.Jun, a war veteran turned detective of the lowly Robot Crimes Unit in Seoul, becomes consumed by an investigation that reconnects him with his sister Morgan, now a prominent robot designer working for a top firm, who is, embarrassingly, dating one of her creations in secret.On the other side of Seoul in a junkyard filled with abandoned robots, eleven-year-old Ruijie sifts through scraps looking for robotic parts that might support her failing body. When she discovers a robot boy named Yoyo among the piles of trash, an unlikely bond is formed since Yoyo is so lifelike, he’s unlike anything she’s seen before.While Morgan prepares to launch the most advanced robot-boy of her career, Jun’s investigation sparks a journey through the underbelly of Seoul, unearthing deeper mysteries about the history of their country and their family. The three siblings must find their way back to each other to reckon with their pasts and the future ahead of them in this poignant and remarkable exploration of what it really means to be human.

The Nod Mag Book Club x Luminous book cove

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'Luminous' by Silvia Park

Book Club

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 Beyond the Book: Namita Dubey in conversation with Adelle Waldman

We’re still not over Adelle Waldman’s 'Help Wanted'—our October pick for The Nod Book Club. So, we called in actor and bookworm Namita Dubey to do what she does best: ask a lot of questions. In this chat, Waldman spills on how her day job inspired the book, who she’d cast in a movie version, and a whole lot more.~The Nod Book Club's Instagram channel: https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbaiNjee79flVG5f/More about The Nod Book Club here: https://thenodmag.com/book-club?utm_source=wa

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Beyond the Book: Ria Chopra in conversation with Amrita Mahale

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Beyond the Book: Ahilya Bamroo in conversation with Shelby Van Pelt

To wrap up The Nod Book Club's August read, 'Remarkably Bright Creatures' (aka “that octopus book”), we got author Shelby Van Pelt and content creator Ahilya Bamroo to chat with us about what makes this story feel like a warm hug (literally), why Lewis Pullman is the best ever, and if an octopus can actually operate a copy machine 🐙~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

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Beyond the Book: Rohan Joshi in conversation with Silvia Park

To discuss The Nod Book Club’s first pick, 'Luminous', we did the only logical thing: teamed up sci-fi sensation Silvia Park with self-confessed tech geek and comedian, Rohan Joshi. Together, they dive into why Sam Altman probably won’t be your bff, what it actually means to be human, and whether we should just let the robots take over already.Join our IG broadcast channel here: https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbaiNjee79flVG5f/More about The Nod Book Club: https://thenodmag.com/book-club

The Nod Book Club

DECEMBER PICK

A Guardian and a Thief

By Ruhi Gilder

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