Radhika Swarup

Can't wait for this book to finally be out in the world after what has felt like an interminable wait. Thank you, Westland Books, for your patience and for the love you have shown to the quirky, impossible, and all too relatable inhabitants of the New New Delhi Book Club.

What is life? • Dostoevsky: It’s hell. • Socrates: It’s a test. • Aristotle: It’s the mind. • Nietzsche: It’s power. • Freud: It’s death. • Marx: It’s the idea. • Picasso: It’s art. • Gandhi: It’s love. • Schopenhauer: It’s suffering. • Bertrand Russell: It’s competition. • Steve Jobs: It’s faith. • Einstein: It’s knowledge. • Stephen Hawking: It’s hope. • Kafka: It’s just the beginning.

Today she came. Pale. Trembling. A young woman no older than twenty-five, clutching in her arms her son, her last living fragment of hope. The boy was limp, his little arms hanging as though life itself had slipped from them. His eyes were two dead stars. Behind her walked the grandmother. A grandmother who had already buried too many. Her face so worn that it seemed older than the land itself, older than grief. The mother spoke haltingly, every word torn from her throat like a piece of flesh. “Diarrhea. Five days,” she whispered, as if naming an unforgivable sin. “But what frightens me…” Her voice cracked. “He no longer eats.” “Since when?” I asked, though I was afraid to know. Ah, that silence. That silence was like a bell tolling for the dead. She looked at her mother, as though asking for permission to speak. Then, with a kind of resigned despair, she confessed: “For a long time.” I gave her medicine. A hollow gesture. A lie we tell ourselves so we do not collapse. She left without a word. But the grandmother stayed. She came closer. Each step was heavy, as if she were carrying not her own body but the body of every mother who ever lived. She leaned toward me and spoke with the voice of someone who has seen hell. “Do not ask her,” she said. “She cannot say it. The child stopped eating on the day he saw his father fall. He saw the blood. He saw the body. He saw everything.” Then she too left, and I was alone with the weight of the world. I am no psychologist. But I have seen the abyss in men’s hearts, and I know what it means when a child refuses life itself. This is not a disease of the stomach. This is the soul crying out: No more. Tell me, what happens to a child’s mind when the first god he ever knew, his father, is struck down before him? What happens when the one who was meant to shield him from death becomes death? The father’s blood was not the only thing spilled that day. The child’s faith was spilled with it. The world collapsed for him. There is no food sweet enough to make him want to taste life again. And this is the deepest cruelty of genocide. It is not the heap of corpses that marks its victory. It is not the smoking ruins. It is not the screams at night. Its triumph is when a living child sits in the dust and refuses the breast, refuses the bread, refuses the world itself. This child will grow, if he grows, with a hollow inside him no bread will ever fill. No embrace will ever close. He will learn to love with fear, to sleep with ghosts beside him. And one day, when he becomes a father, he will place into his child’s hands not only his love but also his terror. And this is how extermination stretches its fingers into the future. It kills not only the body but the capacity to live. Gaza is not merely a place under bombs. It is a factory of grief, a workshop of despair. What is being forged here is not just ruin. It is a generation of children who will one day walk the earth carrying death in their memories, in their dreams, in the way they touch the world. As I write this, my chest burns. My hands tremble. I feel as though my own heart is being gnawed from the inside by rats. If there is a God, and I dare still to believe, then He must be weeping over Gaza tonight. Yes, the father was killed. But the greater crime, the eternal crime, is this: the slow, unseen murder of the child’s soul. This is our apocalypse. Not fire from heaven. Not angels with trumpets. But a child sitting in the rubble, lips pressed shut, eyes empty, refusing to swallow the world’s cruelty. #GazaGenocide

@sayantansunnyg Many congratulations!

Some personal news: Earlier this month, I was promoted to Editorial Director at Simon & Schuster India. Here's to the readers, writers, designers, publicists, booksellers, publishing friends and colleagues who helped along the way. I'll see you soon at the bookstores!

Celebrate #WorldHealthDay with Remember to Rest. This groundbreaking collection asks powerful questions about our collective health that will move and inspire you. It features more than 25 writers from across the world. Which is your favourite? Read now 👇 addastories.org/collection/rem…

What a very, very generous review of The New New Delhi Book Club. It's write ups like this that make the vagaries of the writer's life worth it. @WestlandBooks

Interviewed author Radhika Swarup "It is only as The New New Delhi Book Club was published that I saw that there was a distinct thread linking all my apparently disparate works. " Radhika Swarup (Author- The New New Delhi Book Club) kitaab.org/2025/01/27/rad…

If books be the food of love, read on! Looking for last minute recommendations? We have curated these reads that you can gift your partner for #ValentinesDay !

"for as much as pandemic took from us...it brought great victories too...so many triumphs of human spirit, of large-heartedness, resilience & creativity – were all human" says @rdswarup about her book @TOI_Books, @WestlandBooks timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/boo…

Couldn't have done it without all of you @Westland. @Sanghamitraa_ @karthikavk

We are so excited to see three of our books on the @Blf2025 longlists for fiction and translations. Congratulations @rdswarup @ManojRupda #VRamaswamy #HansdaSowvendraShekhar

@aatreyee2 You've got this, you multitasking marvel!

There's tiredness and then there's "I am a primary caregiver while being a dog mum to an anxiety prone dog and also have a job and is PMS" tired.

Read this beautiful review of The New New Delhi Book Club by @CNBCTV18News. The New New Delhi Book Club is now available in bookstores and online.

What a warm review to wake up to on a cold January morning! Thanks to Ann @literatewanderer for the love for #TheNewNewDwlhiBookClub. ⁦@WestlandBooks⁩ #books #tbr instagram.com/p/DEt7CQ8RND1/…

@RaiSwatiRai @WestlandBooks Hope you enjoy it :).

@rdswarup @WestlandBooks On my tbr

So glad you enjoyed it, Paul, and felt the warmth of The New New Delhi Book Club just as the weather turns so inhospitable. Working with the @WestlandBooks team has been a dream.

Cold day essentials! Have you signed up for #TheNewNewDelhiBookClub yet? Get your copy at your favourite bookstore or online.

What a wonderful, engaging evening that was in a warm and welcoming #Nagpur. My thanks to @FoundationPK, particularly as winter draws in elsewhere!

Cold days deserve some warm stories! ☕️🍩 Get yourself a copy of @rdswarup's The New New Delhi Book Club from your favourite bookstore or online. #WINTER

@PaulWaters99 @faqirchandbooks @CCriadoPerez @PenguinIndia @Bahrisons_books @bedsqpublishers @BrooDoherty @DHHlitagency @VaseemKhanUK @AwaisKhanAuthor @aforauthors @SimonSchusterIN @anniezaidi @AlephBookCo @mayabhushan @speakingtiger14 @Rupa_Books @hema_sukumar @WestlandBooks @CoronetBooks @Diana_Beaumont Hope you enjoy The New New Delhi Book Club, and how I envy you your Khan market afternoon in the dying days of the year!

@faqirchandbooks @CCriadoPerez @PenguinIndia @Bahrisons_books @bedsqpublishers @BrooDoherty @DHHlitagency @VaseemKhanUK @AwaisKhanAuthor @aforauthors @SimonSchusterIN @anniezaidi @AlephBookCo @mayabhushan @speakingtiger14 @Rupa_Books And a dose of @Bahrisons_books cuteness & charm also went into my bag: The New New Delhi Book Club by @rdswarup (another browser recommended it) & Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments by @hema_sukumar - both lovely covers

I love stalking the bookshops of #Delhi, especially Khan Market. Sadly Full Circle has closed, but Bahrisons is still going strong - in the background there. As is Faqir Chand. I never leave the district empty handed…