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Category: Books

  • The White Tiger

    Over seven nights, Balram Halwai writes to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier due to visit India, to explain the real story of Indian enterprise. Born in a village in Bihar's so-called Darkness, pulled out of school to break coal in a tea shop, Balram talks his way into a job as driver for the son of a local landlord and follows his employers to Delhi.

    There he lives in a basement among mosquitoes, watches his masters bribe ministers, and absorbs the habits of servitude that Adiga calls the Rooster Coop. The novel is framed as a confession, so readers know early that Balram has done something drastic to escape; the tension lies in how humiliation, ambition and his master's guilty liberalism push him there.

    Sharp, sardonic and fast, the book was a rebuttal to cheerful stories of India Shining, exposing corruption and class contempt through a narrator who is funny and morally unsettling. It won the Booker Prize in 2008 as Adiga's debut and was filmed by Ramin Bahrani for Netflix in 2021.

    Book details

    AuthorAravind Adiga
    First published2008
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)276
    SettingLaxmangarh in Bihar, Dhanbad, Delhi and Bangalore, 2000s
    AwardsBooker Prize 2008

    Themes

    • Class and servitude
    • Corruption
    • Ambition
    • Rural poverty
    • Moral compromise

    Who should read it

    Readers who like dark satire and want a fierce, entertaining look at inequality in modern India.

  • The Inheritance of Loss

    In the mid-1980s, in a decaying house called Cho Oyu below Kanchenjunga, a bitter retired judge lives with his dog, his elderly cook and his teenage granddaughter Sai, sent to him after her parents' death. Sai falls into a tentative romance with Gyan, her Nepali tutor, just as the Gorkhaland insurgency begins to radicalise young men in Kalimpong and the surrounding hills.

    In alternating chapters, the cook's son Biju moves from one New York restaurant kitchen to the next as an undocumented worker, sleeping in basements and measuring himself against the America he imagined. Flashbacks show the judge's own youth in Cambridge, where racism taught him to despise his Indianness and, in turn, his wife.

    Kiran Desai writes with wry humour and tender detail about colonial hangovers, migration and the humiliations that pass down generations. The novel won the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006; Desai is the daughter of Anita Desai, three times shortlisted for the same prize.

    Book details

    AuthorKiran Desai
    First published2006
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)324
    SettingKalimpong in the eastern Himalaya and New York, mid-1980s
    AwardsBooker Prize 2006, National Book Critics Circle Award 2006

    Themes

    • Postcolonial identity
    • Migration
    • Insurgency
    • Humiliation
    • Globalisation

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in the immigrant experience and quiet, ironic family drama set in the Himalayan foothills.

  • The Namesake

    Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli leave Calcutta for Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s, he as a graduate student and she as a homesick young bride. When their son is born, a delayed letter from her grandmother means the boy is registered under a pet name, Gogol, chosen by Ashoke for reasons connected to a train accident he survived in India.

    The novel follows Gogol from childhood birthdays through Yale, an architecture career in New York and relationships with women who represent different escapes: a wealthy Manhattan family, and a fellow Bengali American with her own restlessness. Renaming himself Nikhil, he keeps his parents at a distance, until life forces him to reckon with what they carried.

    Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel is understated and observant, built from meals, rituals and long silences rather than dramatic plot. It is one of the best-known novels of the South Asian diaspora in America, and Mira Nair's 2006 film with Irrfan Khan and Tabu brought it to a wider audience.

    Book details

    AuthorJhumpa Lahiri
    First published2003
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)291
    SettingCambridge and suburban Massachusetts, New York and Calcutta, 1968 to 2000

    Themes

    • Diaspora identity
    • Names and selfhood
    • Parents and children
    • Assimilation
    • Grief

    Who should read it

    Anyone who has felt caught between their parents' homeland and the country they grew up in.

  • Interpreter of Maladies

    Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection gathers nine stories that move between Boston-area suburbs and Calcutta. In the opening story a young couple, estranged after a stillbirth, use nightly power cuts to confess things they have kept from each other. In the title piece, a tour guide who translates patients' symptoms for a doctor is unsettled when an American-born tourist confides a secret to him.

    Other stories follow a Bengali girl in 1971 who watches a family friend from Dhaka follow news of the Bangladesh war, a Calcutta stairwell sweeper whose stories nobody believes, a lonely academic's wife who cannot learn to drive, and a young man settling into a Cambridge rooming house run by a century-old landlady.

    The writing is restrained and exact, and the drama lies in what characters notice and fail to say. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, an unusual honour for a first collection, along with the PEN/Hemingway Award, and it is widely taught as a model of the modern short story.

    Book details

    AuthorJhumpa Lahiri
    First published1999
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)198
    SettingBoston area, New Jersey, Calcutta and Orissa, 1970s to 1990s
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction 2000, PEN/Hemingway Award 1999

    Themes

    • Marriage and estrangement
    • Displacement
    • Communication
    • Loneliness
    • Cultural translation

    Who should read it

    Readers who appreciate subtle, perfectly made short fiction about emotional distance and belonging.

  • The Lowland

    Subhash and Udayan Mitra are born fifteen months apart in Tollygunge, a south Calcutta neighbourhood bordered by two ponds and a stretch of flood-prone land. Inseparable as boys, they diverge in the late 1960s: Udayan, charismatic and impatient, is drawn into the Maoist-inspired Naxalite uprising, while the cautious Subhash goes to Rhode Island to study oceanography.

    Udayan marries Gauri, a philosophy student with her own fierce intelligence, without his parents' blessing. When political violence reaches the family, Subhash makes a choice meant as rescue that binds him, Gauri and a child to one another in ways none of them can fully accept. The novel then follows its characters across fifty years and two continents.

    Lahiri's prose is calm and closely observed, and she lets long time spans reveal how a single event goes on shaping lives. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a finalist for the US National Book Award, and it won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

    Book details

    AuthorJhumpa Lahiri
    First published2013
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)340
    SettingTollygunge, Calcutta and coastal Rhode Island, 1950s to 2010s
    AwardsDSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015

    Themes

    • Brotherhood
    • Political radicalism
    • Motherhood
    • Guilt
    • Exile

    Who should read it

    Readers who like slow-burning family novels that trace one choice across generations.

  • The God of Small Things

    Set in the village of Ayemenem in Kerala, the novel moves between 1969, when the fraternal twins Estha and Rahel are seven, and 1993, when they meet again as damaged adults. Their mother Ammu, divorced and quietly defiant, lives on sufferance in her family's house alongside a pickle factory, a bitter grand-aunt and an Oxford-educated uncle who calls himself a Marxist.

    The arrival of the twins' half-English cousin Sophie Mol and Ammu's attachment to Velutha, a gifted carpenter from a Dalit family, bring the household's rules about who may love whom into sharp conflict. Roy reveals the shape of the disaster early and then circles back, so the suspense lies less in what happens than in how ordinary prejudice, politics and fear make it unavoidable.

    The prose is the book's signature: invented compound words, capitalised phrases borrowed from a child's way of seeing, and a looping chronology. It won the Booker Prize in 1997 and remains a defining Indian novel in English for the way it ties intimate grief to caste, gender and the small cruelties of respectable families.

    Book details

    AuthorArundhati Roy
    First published1997
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)340
    SettingAyemenem, Kerala, 1969 and 1993
    AwardsBooker Prize 1997

    Themes

    • Caste
    • Forbidden love
    • Childhood trauma
    • Family

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy lyrical, non-linear fiction and are ready for a story whose tenderness and heartbreak arrive together.

  • The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

    Twenty years after her debut, Arundhati Roy returned to fiction with a sprawling novel that begins in Old Delhi. Anjum, born intersex and raised as a boy named Aftab, leaves her family to live in the Khwabgah, a house of hijras, and later settles among the graves of a Muslim cemetery, where she gradually builds a refuge for people the city has pushed out.

    A second strand belongs to Tilottama, an elusive architecture student, and the three men who love her: a journalist, an intelligence officer and a Kashmiri who becomes a militant. Through them the book enters the violence of the Kashmir valley, with its checkpoints, torture centres and disappeared sons, and the two narratives slowly converge around an abandoned baby.

    The novel is restless and openly political, folding in the 2002 Gujarat riots, the anti-corruption protests at Jantar Mantar and Maoist insurgency in central India. Some readers find it diffuse, but its compassion for misfits and its refusal to look away from state violence make it a deliberate counterpoint to tidier portraits of modern India.

    Book details

    AuthorArundhati Roy
    First published2017
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)445
    SettingDelhi and the Kashmir valley, 1950s to 2010s

    Themes

    • Gender identity
    • Kashmir conflict
    • Outsiders and belonging
    • State violence
    • Religious nationalism

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a politically charged, many-voiced novel about the people left out of India's success story.

  • Midnight’s Children

    Saleem Sinai is born in Bombay at the exact moment India becomes independent on 15 August 1947, and he comes to believe his life is chained to the fate of the nation. Writing his story in a pickle factory while he races against his own physical decline, he starts decades earlier with his grandfather, a Kashmiri doctor, and works forward through family secrets and swapped identities.

    Saleem learns that all 1,001 children born in the first hour of independence have magical gifts, and his own telepathy lets him convene them in his head. His fortunes track the country's: Partition aftershocks, the wars with Pakistan, the birth of Bangladesh and Indira Gandhi's Emergency. His rival Shiva, born at the same instant, embodies the violent counter-current to Saleem's hopes.

    Rushdie writes in an exuberant, digressive voice that mixes Indian oral storytelling with magic realism and Bombay slang. The novel won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was later named the Booker of Bookers and the Best of the Booker, and it changed what Indian writing in English felt free to attempt.

    Book details

    AuthorSalman Rushdie
    First published1981
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)647
    SettingKashmir, Amritsar, Agra, Bombay, Karachi and Dhaka, 1915 to 1977
    AwardsBooker Prize 1981, Booker of Bookers 1993, Best of the Booker 2008

    Themes

    • Partition
    • National identity
    • Memory and storytelling
    • Fate
    • The emergency

    Who should read it

    Readers ready for a dense, playful epic that retells modern South Asian history through one unreliable narrator.

  • The Satanic Verses

    The novel opens with a hijacked jet exploding above the English Channel. Two passengers fall to earth alive: Gibreel Farishta, a Bombay film star famous for playing gods, and Saladin Chamcha, a voice actor who has worked hard to become English. In the days that follow Gibreel acquires a halo while Saladin sprouts horns and hooves, and both must make sense of what they have become in Thatcher-era London.

    Interwoven with their story are Gibreel's dreams, which include a reimagining of the early days of a new religion in a desert city called Jahilia, a tale of a village that walks into the sea following a visionary girl, and an exiled cleric plotting revolution. These sequences, especially the treatment of a prophet named Mahound, led to the 1989 fatwa against Rushdie and years in hiding.

    Read apart from the controversy, the book is about migration and the split self: what immigrants give up, how racism reshapes them, and whether a person can remake their identity without losing it. It won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988 and was shortlisted for the Booker.

    Book details

    AuthorSalman Rushdie
    First published1988
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)561
    SettingLondon, Bombay and dream-worlds including the city of Jahilia, 1980s
    AwardsWhitbread Novel Award 1988

    Themes

    • Migration
    • Identity and transformation
    • Faith and doubt
    • Racism in britain
    • Good and evil

    Who should read it

    Readers curious about the novel behind the fatwa who want a demanding satire of faith, celebrity and immigrant life.

  • The Moor’s Last Sigh

    Moraes Zogoiby, nicknamed the Moor, is the son of a Catholic heiress to a Cochin pepper fortune and a Jewish clerk who becomes a Bombay crime lord. Born with a clubbed hand and a body that ages at double speed, he narrates the rise and decline of his family from a hiding place in Spain, beginning with spice-trade feuds and ending in the communal politics of 1990s Bombay.

    At the centre is his mother Aurora, a brilliant and imperious painter whose canvases turn the family saga into myth, linking it to Boabdil, the last Moorish sultan of Granada. Around her swirl lovers, rival artists, a Hindu nationalist party boss modelled on real figures, and a Bombay that is losing its cosmopolitan tolerance.

    Rushdie's first full novel after the fatwa is ornate, comic and elegiac, and it mourns the loss of a mixed, plural India. It won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1995 and was shortlisted for the Booker. Readers who loved Midnight's Children will recognise the energy, darkened by exile.

    Book details

    AuthorSalman Rushdie
    First published1995
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)434
    SettingCochin, Bombay and Andalusia, Spain, late 19th century to 1990s
    AwardsWhitbread Novel Award 1995

    Themes

    • Pluralism
    • Art and power
    • Mothers and sons
    • Communalism
    • Exile

    Who should read it

    Fans of maximalist family sagas who want Rushdie's most personal lament for cosmopolitan Bombay.