Finally, the list is here. These are the top 15 fiction bestsellers at Kunzum in November. Ranging from books set in bookshops to a café that takes you on a journey through time to an inquest into Roman history and the world of conspiracy and guile, these books cover your top 15 fiction must reads. Which ones have you read?
1. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
The novel revolves around 25-year-old Takako, who gets dumped by her boyfriend as he is marrying someone else. With nowhere else to go, she ends up living at the Morisaki Bookshop at her eccentric uncle’s Satoru’s behest. What follows is Takako’s journey into books, discovering a different side of her uncle and coming to terms with the events taking place in her life and around her. The Morisaki bookshop is a book of life, love, and the healing power of books.
2. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
For a 100 years, a small café in a back alley in Tokyo has been serving coffee and the chance to travel back in time. In come four visitors to the café, each with a desire to time-travel in order to achieve closure. Each man has a different person to visit and a different unfinished task to complete. But time travel always comes with its own risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the cafe, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold.
3. Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
The first ever collection of short stories by the Pulitzer Prize winning author, the book is set in Rome. Both a metropolis and a monument, Rome is the protagonist, not the setting of these nine stories. The stories were written in Italian – Lahiri’s adopted language – and then translated to English by Lahiri herself. The inspiration for these stories comes from the Italian masters Alberto Moravia and the ghost of Dante Alighieri.
4. Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco
In Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco’s unique visual journalism has rendered a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Footnotes in Gaza, his most ambitious work to date, transforms a critical conflict of our age into intimate and immediate experience. Footnotes in Gaza is about Rafah, a squalid town at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip. Mostly rubble, Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in bitter conflicts. Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinian refugees dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah – coldblooded massacre or dreadful mistake – reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy.
5. Anxious People by Fredrick Backman
A mysterious masked figure approaches a bank in a small town in Sweden. Two hours later, what was to be a bank robbery has turned into a hostage situation that’s quickly spiralling out of control. There are seven people trapped inside. But instead of being afraid, they are now beginning to get irritated. As the minutes go by, they realise that instead of them, it might be their captive who might need rescuing.
6. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
The midnight library, stuck in limbo between life and death, is where one goes to get one last chance to make things right. And this is where Nora Seed finds herself. Up till now, she’s lived a life of misery and regret and a general feeling of being let down by everyone. The books enable her to live her life differently. Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: What is the best way to live?
7. Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum
Yeongju, who’s done everything the right way till it all falls apart, is burned out. With nothing left from her previous life, Yeongju quits her high-flying career, gets a divorce and opens a bookshop. It is in this bookshop in a quaint neighbourhood in Seoul that Yeongju and her customers take refuge. One thing unites all her customers – they all have disappointments in their past. The Hyunam-dong Bookshop is the one place where they come and learn how to truly live.
8. Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag
Translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, Sakina’s Kiss is a delicate, precise meditation on the persistence of old biases―and a rattled masculinity―in India’s changing social and political landscape. Set over four mostly sleepless days, that begins with urgent knocks on the door one evening, the novel follows Venkat as he loses grasp of the narrative and slowly loses grasp of his wife and daughter.
9. The Door-to-Door Bookstore by Carsten Henn
Carl Kollhoff is a bookseller in a small town in Germany. Every evening, after closing time, he walks through the small picturesque town to deliver books to some of his special customers, for whom Kollhoff is the only connection to the world. Then Kollhoff loses his job. It is now up to a nine-year-old girl to help Kollhoff and all his special customers to find the courage to rebuild their bonds with each other.
10. Independence by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The three sisters, Priya, Jamini and Deepa, residents of Ranipur in Bengal find their lives turned upside down when their father is killed. Soon after Partition follows and the three girls find themselves separate from each other. The novel follows the three girls as they try to figure life out, afraid not just for themselves, but also each other, and understand what it means to be independent, and at what cost?
11. The Handmaid’s Tale (Graphic Novel Edition) by Margaret Atwood
In the Republic of Gilead, Offred, a Handmaid in the household of the Commander and his wife, has only one role under the new social order: once a month she must lie on her back and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant. In an age of declining births, Offred and the other handmaids are of value only if they are fertile. Amid this comes Offred’s memory of being an independent woman with a job and a family. Now, all she has are her memories and a will to survive – both seen as acts of rebellion.
12. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Norwegian Wood was Murakami’s ride to literary stardom. Norwegian Wood follows Toru Watanabe as he is drifts between the past to his first love Naoko to the future when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life. Does he give up on the ghosts past or does he pick the future?
13. She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai
She and Her Cat is the story of Miyu and Chobi. Miyu lives alone with her cat Chobi. As Miyu grows up and discovers both freedom and loneliness that comes with growing up, her cat Chobi learns of the outside world. For Miyu and Chobi, time passes slowly, and then the harsh realities of the world catch up.
14. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow By Gabrielle Zevin
Video games unite two kids who meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. One is recovering from an accident, the other is visiting his sister. A friendship develops and then they separate only to meet eight years later. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love – making games. Their collaborations make them superstars. Haig’s novel examines the nature of identity, creativity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play and, above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.
15. Traitor’s Gate by Jeffery Archer
Chief Superintendent William Warwick and his second-in-command Inspector Ross Hogan must work together to stop master criminal Miles Faulkner who has his heart set on pulling off the most outrageous theft in history. – has been in charge of the operation. And for four years it’s run like clockwork. Warwick has only 24 hours in which to stop Faulkner. Will he be able to do it?
How many of these have you read? If you still haven’t read these, you are missing out on some amazing stories. Head out to any Kunzum store and get your copy now.
Pick up any or all of these books from any Kunzum store or WhatsApp +91.8800200280 to order. Buy the book(s) and the coffee’s on us.