Neel Mukherjee was born in Calcutta. His first novel, A Life Apart (2010), won the Vodafone-Crossword Award in India, the Writers Guild of Great Britain Award for best fiction, and was shortlisted for the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The Lives of Others is his second novel. He lives in London.
2014 Booker Prize (shortlist) : The Lives of Others
Neel Mukherjee recommends
The Weight of Angels (2026) John Boyne "John Boyne confers a second immortality on Oscar Wilde in this counterfactual life of the writer. It is granularly imagined, witty, hugely pleasurable to read, and exceptionally moving. A great public wrong can ruin a life, as it did Wilde's. Boyne's great imaginative generosity is to rescue, in fiction, a damaged reputation and let it live again, live anew."
Underspin (2025) E Y Zhao "E. Y. Zhao arrives on the literary scene like Minerva emerging from the head of Zeus: fully formed, formidable, and a superior force to be reckoned with. Who knew the world needed a table-tennis novel? Except that it is not a table tennis novel, or not just one - it is, indelibly, what the novel has always been about: the tangle of human life; error, power, damage, striving; the complicated ties that connect us in a web at once tensile, tough, and frangible. Written in beautiful, burnished prose, and structured in a dazzlingly intelligent way, Underspin will make you ask: How can this be a first novel?"
The Bee Sting (2023) Paul Murray "This novel is as generous, expansive, and glorious as a cathedral, as intimate as pillow-talk, and as funny and heartbreaking as nothing you've read before. Paul Murray may just be the most spellbinding storyteller writing today. A magisterial piece of work."
The Unfolding (2022) A M Homes "The Unfolding is Swiftian in its energy and bite, yet brimful of compassion and emotion. The entwining of the personal and the political feels as if it's born again to a sparkling new life. How does she do it?"
The Furrows (2022) Namwali Serpell "Who could have imagined that a novel about loss and long grieving could be so soaring, so sexy, so luminously beautiful and poetic, such a rich and shimmeringly scored piece for three voices?"
Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors (2022) Aravind Jayan "So here it is, at last: an insider view of the clash between generations seen from the perspective of the online Indian Gen Z. Written with wryness, compassion, intelligence, crystal clarity and a dry sense of humour, Aravind Jayan's unputdownable debut features on of the most engaging and Nabokovianly complicated narrators I've encountered in the last God knows how many years. It's impossible not to love this book. You'll laugh and laugh until you find yourself devastated by the last thirty or so pages, and you'll still be laughing."
Our Wives Under the Sea (2022) Julia Armfield "A strange, unnerving novel that wrongfoots you at every turn and invites you to think again about loss, absence, and transformation. A lyrically written elegy."
Booth (2022) Karen Joy Fowler "Booth is a subtly devastating meditation on how the USA arrived at this troubled point in its present history by looking at a mid-nineteenth-century family. Its world - dense, granular, intricate - is created with immense care and precision ... This is her finest, most beautiful novel to date."
Love Marriage (2022) Monica Ali "A novel with the richness, and the throng and press and hum of life itself, Love Marriage is bold, compassionate, big-hearted, pitch-perfectly written, and utterly unputdownable. Every single character lives and breathes on the page. Make time for all of them for they are going to take up residence in your mind and soul for a long, long time."
Real Easy (2022) Marie Rutkoski "Very possibly the best crime fiction book since Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, Real Easy is turn-your-phone-off-and-cancel-all-your-meetings gripping. But it is also so much more than that: every character is instantly alive and recognizable the moment they appear on the page; the writing is sustainedly beautiful and intelligent, at times lyrical, at others, sassy and crackling; and the psychological underpinnings are unerring, resonant, utterly convincing. This book is a winner, whichever way you turn it."
Scary Monsters (2021) Michelle de Kretser "Written with incandescent moral energy, boundless compassion, and astonishing precision and beauty, Michelle de Kretser's Scary Monsters extends the very possibilities of the novel form. On the contemporary international scene, there are very, very few writers who can match her style, her intelligence, her vision. To read her is to be changed."
Borne (2017) (Borne, book 1) Jeff VanderMeer "Jeff VanderMeer’s deeply strange and brilliant new novel extends the meditation on the central question of non-human sentience in his earlier work … No one writes a post-apocalyptic landscape like VanderMeer, so detailed and strange in all its lineaments and topography."
