Nandan Jha, who heads sales at Penguin Random House India, and has seen the book market evolve in the last quarter of a century, agrees that non-fiction is still exceedingly popular. Fiction, it appears, is making an unnoticed comeback.īut what are publishers, booksellers and readers saying?

Figures indicate that the growth rate of non-fiction is about 4 per cent while fiction has been growing at about 20 per cent. Colleen Hoover’s It Starts With Us and It Ends With Us, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, When I Am With You by Durjoy Dutta and Amish’s The War Of Lanka held the pride of place in fiction.Īccording to industry sources, while non-fiction does hold the dominant share of the market (55 per cent), fiction in the last couple of years has been growing and growing steadily. Based on publicly available information, among the recent bestsellers in non-fiction according to Nielsen were Atomic Habits by James Clear, The Psychology Of Money by Morgan Housel, Get Epic Shit Done by Ankur Warikoo, Life’s Amazing Secrets by Gaur Gopal Das and Doglapan by Ashneer Grover. One place that could possibly provide some insights into the mind of the Indian reader is the Nielsen bestselling chart which compiles data from a huge selection of bookshops throughout the country and has established itself over the last decade as a very reliable source of information. Given these factors, is it possible to try and figure out who this elusive creature is - the Indian reader of English? What is he reading? Does he prefer fiction to non-fiction? And the genres? In short, what sells? In particular, the likes and dislikes of this diffused market are hard to completely comprehend owing to the fact that local and regional issues and tastes do not necessarily dictate preferences. Indians who know English are not defined by geography and the Indian English reading market is difficult to clearly pin down. To spout a cliché, English’s place in India is an odd one.

That Night by Nidhi Upadhyay