A book festival can be wonderfully overwhelming.
You enter intending to browse for an hour. Then you encounter hundreds of stalls, thousands of titles and more recommendations than any reading list can reasonably hold. Every second display promises a bestseller, an unforgettable romance, a shocking secret or an idea that will change how you see the world.
So, how do you decide what deserves your attention?
My suggestion is to begin not with a list of popular books, but with the questions and conflicts that fascinate you.
If you enjoy thrillers, technology, complicated relationships, moral dilemmas and stories rooted in contemporary India, the Gomti Book Festival 2026 can become more than a place to buy your favourite books. It can help you discover the intellectual and fictional territory you want to explore next.
Here is what I would look for.
Why Thrillers Continue to Attract Readers
Thrillers have always been built around danger, uncertainty and the fear that something important may be taken away.
That “something” was once commonly a person’s life, a nation’s security or a fortune hidden somewhere. Those stakes remain, but the modern thriller has acquired new vulnerabilities.
Today, a character may stand to lose:
- A career built over several decades
- A relationship damaged by one private message
- A reputation destroyed by manipulated information
- Access to financial accounts or confidential data
- Control over an identity created online
- The ability to distinguish a human decision from an algorithmic one
This is one reason thrillers remain so popular. The genre has changed with the nature of our fears.
A good thriller lets us enter a dangerous situation while remaining safely outside it. A more thoughtful thriller does something else: it makes us wonder what we would have done in the character’s place.
Would we reveal the truth if doing so could destroy someone we loved? Would we exploit information that had reached us accidentally? Would we forgive a betrayal committed under pressure? Would we obey a system whose decision appeared efficient but morally wrong?
The chase may keep us turning the pages. The dilemma is what stays with us afterwards.
Technology Is Now a Source of Human Conflict
Technology in fiction does not have to mean pages of code, futuristic machines or elaborate explanations of how a system works.
Its more interesting role is to alter the choices available to people.
A dating app can introduce two strangers who would never otherwise have met. It can also allow someone to construct a persuasive false identity. A messaging platform can bring people closer while preserving a searchable history of their weakest moments. Artificial intelligence can help us make better decisions, but it can also make manipulation faster, cheaper and more difficult to detect.
Technology does not invent desire, jealousy, ambition, resentment or the appetite for power. It changes their reach.
That makes it a compelling source of modern conflict. A lie can travel further. A secret can be copied. A reputation can be attacked by people the victim has never met. An intimate mistake can acquire corporate or even national consequences.
While walking through the stalls at Gomti Book Festival 2026, therefore, do not look only for books filed under “technology.” Look for books that examine what technology does to people, institutions and power.
They may be found among thrillers, history, international affairs, business, psychology, romance or popular science. The categories may be separate on the shelves, but the questions increasingly overlap.
Look for Stories About Love, Trust, Surveillance and Blackmail
Romance and technology are sometimes treated as unrelated literary territories. In contemporary life, they are deeply entangled.
People meet online, communicate through devices, share photographs, reveal vulnerabilities and leave behind digital records of relationships. Trust is no longer based only on what people tell one another. It is also shaped by what they conceal, delete, forward, record or discover.
This creates fertile territory for fiction.
A love story asks whether two people can trust each other. A thriller asks what happens when they cannot. A technology-driven thriller can ask who else is watching while they try.
Blackmail sits at the intersection of these concerns. It does not always depend on stealing a great secret. Sometimes it begins with a truth that someone cannot afford to have revealed. The blackmailer’s real weapon is not information alone, but an understanding of what the victim fears losing.
At the festival, look for novels in which danger grows out of human relationships rather than arriving from outside them. The most unsettling antagonist may not be a professional criminal. It may be a colleague, partner, friend or stranger who has understood someone’s vulnerability better than they have understood it themselves.
Four Nonfiction Books for Readers Who Like Their Reality Thrilling
Some of the most gripping books about technology and power are not novels. They are works of history, geopolitics and investigative journalism that reveal how closely the modern world resembles a thriller.
These are four titles I would recommend looking for at the festival.
Chip War by Chris Miller
Chris Miller explains how semiconductors became essential not only to smartphones and computers but also to economic strength, military capability and geopolitical power.
The book traces the development of the chip industry and the extraordinary concentration of expertise and manufacturing across a small number of companies and countries. It shows why competition over advanced semiconductors has become central to the relationship between the United States and China; and why Taiwan occupies such a consequential position.
Chokepoints by Edward Fishman
In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman examines how USA used weaponised finance, trade and technology to take on Iran, Russia and China.
By restricting access to banking networks, critical technologies and global markets, Fishman explores how the United States developed and deployed surgical forms of economic pressure against the three countries.
The book is particularly relevant to readers interested in invisible power. A battle may be shaped not only by armies, but by payment systems, export controls, computer chips and the ability to deny an adversary access to something on which it has become dependent.
Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI examines how information networks have helped human societies cooperate, create institutions and exercise power.
Harari challenges the comforting assumption that more information automatically produces more truth or wisdom. Information can help people understand reality, but it can also create myths, strengthen bureaucracies, enable surveillance and support systems of control.
For someone thinking about artificial intelligence, this is an important shift in perspective. The question is not simply whether AI will become more intelligent. It is how AI will participate in the networks through which societies make decisions; and whether humans will continue to understand or control those decisions.
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth
Nicole Perlroth investigates the secretive international market for “zero-day” vulnerabilities; software flaws unknown to their developers and therefore capable of being exploited before a defence is available.
The book takes readers into a world of hackers, intelligence agencies, defence contractors and cyberweapons dealers. It also exposes a difficult moral question: when a government discovers or purchases a software vulnerability, should it disclose the flaw so that ordinary users can be protected, or preserve it as a weapon?
Written with the momentum of a thriller, the book demonstrates that the infrastructure of modern life may contain weaknesses known to people whose interests do not align with ours.
From Reading These Conflicts to Writing Love Swipe Blackmail
The questions that interest me as a reader inevitably enter the stories I write.
Love Swipe Blackmail begins in an intimate and recognisable world: relationships, attraction, dating apps and the temptation to cross a line while believing that the consequences can be controlled.
But technology makes private choices traceable. It connects strangers, preserves evidence and gives deception new possibilities. The novel explores love, loyalty, betrayal and friendship through three couples and two mysterious women; but its larger concern is what happens when human desire meets a digital trail.
How Shadow Play: Love & Blackmail Expands the World
In Shadow Play: Love & Blackmail, the consequences move beyond intimate relationships.
Cyber breaches threaten careers and reputations. Fake companies, social engineering, honey traps and institutional interests create a larger field of deception. The vulnerabilities remain human, but the scale becomes corporate and national.
The central question also evolves. What if an attack is not intended primarily to steal money or data? What if its real objective is to damage trust, ruin a career, manipulate an organisation or provoke a particular response?
Where My Forthcoming AI-Centred Thriller Goes Next
The forthcoming third novel takes this progression further into the world of artificial intelligence and geopolitical competition.
AI introduces a different kind of uncertainty. A person may be deceived by another person; but they may also be influenced by a system that can imitate, predict, persuade and act at enormous speed.
The novel will continue to explore the territory connecting technology with human behaviour. But it will also ask larger questions about India, China, intelligence, autonomous decision-making and the struggle to control systems capable of learning.
Let the Festival Expand Your Reading Identity
At Gomti Book Festival 2026, you do not need to choose between fiction and nonfiction, romance and geopolitics, or technology and human stories.
Follow the connections between them.
A book about semiconductors can explain geopolitical power. An investigation into cyberweapons can inspire the tension of a thriller. A history of information networks can change how we understand AI. A novel about blackmail can reveal how technology enters the most private parts of our lives.
The best discovery at a book festival is not always one celebrated title. Sometimes it is the realisation that several apparently different shelves belong to the same conversation.
That conversation, between technology, trust, relationships, power and human choice, is the one I will be looking for.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kinds of books should thriller readers explore at Gomti Book Festival 2026?
In addition to crime and suspense novels, look at cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, geopolitics, espionage, psychology and narrative nonfiction. These subjects often contain the real conflicts from which contemporary thrillers emerge.
Are technology books suitable for readers without a technical background?
Yes. Books such as Chip War, Chokepoints, Nexus and This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends concentrate on history, power, people and consequences. They do not require specialist technical knowledge.
Where should readers begin with Nitish Bhushan’s novels?
Begin with Love Swipe Blackmail, which introduces the characters and the intersection of relationships, technology and blackmail. Continue with Shadow Play: Love & Blackmail, which expands the story into cyber deception, reputational risk and larger institutional stakes.