Sidharth Dhanvant Shangvi

SIDDHARTH DHANVANT SHANGHVI
Writer

A book that means a lot to you?
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. It arrests poetry, sensuality and politics in the cast of its enchanted story. It plays with the idea of time like clay, veering between the past and the present as a hawk in the valley soars and dives with startling elegance.

How many books do you own?
4,000; many of them inherited from my grandfather, who read voraciously and taught us to do the same.

Your favourite character from a book and why?
Sula, from Beloved by Toni Morrison, because she loved her daughter enough to kill her; and Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s short novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, because she drank too much and lived a lot.

Last book bought?
Andrew O’Hagan’s Be Near Me.

Favourite genre?
Literary-shmiterary
.
Last book read?
A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman; Veronica by Mary Gaitskill, which I can’t recommend enough — it’s heady, sexy, conceited and heartbroken. I loved, for
uite different reasons, The Golden Age by Tahmima Anam. Sadly, Anam never made it to the Man Booker list; instead, a slip of a novel, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach did — more fool me.

A book you wish you’d written?
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt.

A book you’ve always wanted to read but haven’t?
Dog Breeding for Professionals by Dr Herbert Richards.

LAKSHMI INDRASIMHAN