The Books that Made 2025: And the round up that blew us away!!
Taking a break from the whirlwind of book launches all around me, I slipped through an Alice rabbit hole into a most engaging review of books by the Managing Editor of Readomania, Indrani Ganguly, who, serendipitously became my editor for Meandering Mouthfuls, through the empowering and empathetic head of Readomania, Dipankar Mukherjee .
She enticed us, first, into the publishing process, an insight that made one realize the trawling and toiling and testing of manuscripts that an editor eargasms to understand the psyche of writers of all genres, something that breaches mere academic pursuits to impart passion and purpose into selection.
How else would we have managed to get a taste of Shalini Mullick’s The Way Home, so confidently winning the Archer-Amish Award 2025 and Nithya Neelakantan being one of the three finalists for her book Navapashanam – both shining on the London stage with these bestselling authors, and the other authors who were heaped with awards like Monica Singh’s Pronounced Guilty. A very attractive book cover one could not forget was the Geisha in the Gota Patti.
Where do they all come from? And how amazingly they get discovered, and published!
Easier to read stories, but what about the non-fiction? Again, Indrani chose the gamut of titles that ranged from the political, to rock n roll, from domestic violence demitted, to travel, and a doctor’s deeply moving memoir—we realized that there is nothing that Readomania does not tackle.
Moving on to the poetic prism, Ganguly’s introspection made us as readers realize that we need to take a step back and give verse a chance.
The thriller tomes – the Editor’s favourite—showed how the Indian scenario is rich with plots and possibilities and how the folkloric and mythical and psychological can impact us and was a pointer to the wide berth that the editing team gave to such genres.
Short stories were not given short shrift – a vast array of narratives that made us feel that this genre is a compelling on, especially with the limited attention spans of the new readers. And there was no let up on the young authors.
What opened our eyes was the wisdom, the passion, the insightful approaches of an editor, not to mention the testing spaces of toil, never letting up, and always in optimistic uptick.
So good to have Readomania as a committed and creative publisher in our lives.
Read Indrani Ganguly's year-end article here
Grab Meandering Mouthfuls here
About the Author
Rita Bhimani, best known as a PR guru for her contribution to the profession for 50 years, is also a columnist, an author of five books, three of them on PR, and an inveterate traveller who started off her journalistic career with an Eating Out column. Her books titled Presence Perfect: Your Protein Boost for Positive Image in 24 doses and Kolkata: India’s Cultural Confluence will be her seventh and eighth and Meandering Mouthfuls, her sixth, is a tome of travel and taste.
Rita lives and works in Kolkata, nurturing her PR consultancy firm, Ritam Communications, writing on art, food and people-centric stories, doing select cruises, keeping up a morning walk and exercise regimen, relaxing with her classical piano and chilling with son, Gautam, daughter-in-law Rashi and grandson Raag. Missing in the picture is her golden other, the veteran journalist and writer Kishore Bhimani, who left his crease in 2020.
Comments