Tashan Mehta’s Favourite Books!

We asked Tashan Mehta, the author of Mad Sisters of Esi about some of her favourite book recommendations. Check out her list below!

Articles on book recommendations are tricky beasts. Each book is a conversation and, of course, all conversations are not meant for all people at all times. Whenever anyone asks me “What do I read?”, I first ask them “What are you looking for and why?”

But you can’t do that with an article, so I’ll settle for a singular thread running through these recommendations: tenderness. The novel of tenderness is one I’ve only recently become attuned to, but it has had a profound impact on my artistic practice. I find the word itself slippery—Google defines it as “gentleness or kindness” but it isn’t that entirely, not when you consider its echoes and reverberations. To me, it’s an ache, a thumb press into the clay of my heart; I don’t have more concrete language than that. But here are the books that evoke this feeling for me, and bring me closer to understanding and living this term.

The Goblin Emperor

Katherine Addison

Oh, this book. I put it first on every list because it’s the one you’re least likely to pick up—Look at that title! Look at that cover! It’s clearly not for me—but it is the worthiest of your attention. Read it as you would Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—surrender yourself to the tide of names, fractions and cities and let the novel carry you. I promise, it grows into your bones by the end of it, and when you turn the last page, you feel slit down the center. I know no other book that does kindness or tenderness as well as this. It deserves your love.

We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves

Karen Joy Fowler

I finished this book in a day; I was alone at home, reading on the couch, and when it ended, I folded into myself and wept and wept. I recommend reading as little about it as possible before you begin; let the story surprise you on its own terms. The only thing I will say is that it is about the nature of humanness and the bonds we form in love, and it’s inspired by real life. And, of course, it is about sisters. As much as the broad strokes of the story moved me, it was Fowler’s ability to look at human nature in its complex, gritty, and tender detail that cracked me open.

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

A gentle, lilting, slight novel on how perspective holds our happiness in its hands. Clarke’s voice is astonishing; she carves with language so slowly and gently, like water. It’s an incredible skill. This novel has everything I love in my literature—an alternate reality created from the bones of our most essential natures—and it gave me a new, strange lens with which to see our world again.

Beautiful World, Where Are You?

Sally Rooney

I avoided Sally Rooney for years—hype often has the opposite effect than intended—and I don’t think I would have picked her up if a friend hadn’t messaged to say, look, you should, these books are made for you. And they are. Rooney has an uncanny ability to capture the alienation and over-connection of our times, to look through the fog towards the ridiculous, awkward actions we make in our desperate attempts to find what is human: love, belonging, friends. Beautiful World, Where Are You? is a terrible title but a gorgeous book: its tenderness is born from people who cannot say what they want, even to themselves, and yet they reach, over and over, to find a rope they can hold on to.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro is the master of tender, and I admire him for the quiet, careful way in which his books unfold that feeling—delicately, with no bombast or fireworks, just so slowly the emotion blooms within you. Remains of the Day is my favorite novel of his, but Never Let Me Go makes this list because it does tenderness with such surety, such stealth, I didn’t realize how deeply it had moved me until the last page.

Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller

I have a great respect for books that can pull off a sense of inevitability and powerlessness, a feeling of forces greater than the individual. By its very nature, a novel is constructed so if the author can make you forget that everything on the page has been carefully plotted, then they’ve made something bright and alive. Song of Achilles is a strange contender for the novel of tenderness—it’s about war, and Greek myth, and honor in a story we’ve heard a thousand times. But of course, it is also about love. Miller has a startling skill for showcasing vulnerability, how buffeted we are by forces greater than ourselves, and the power we reach for within our powerlessness. I loved it.