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Category: Books

  • The Guide

    Raju, recently released from prison, takes shelter in a ruined temple by a river near a village called Mangala. When a villager mistakes him for a sage, Raju finds it easier to accept the role than to explain himself, and soon people bring him food, problems and reverence. The novel alternates between this present and Raju's account of how he got here.

    Years earlier Raju ran a shop at Malgudi railway station and became a popular guide for tourists. One of his clients was Marco, a cold archaeologist, and his wife Rosie, a gifted dancer whose husband despises her art. Raju's involvement with Rosie, and his management of her career as a star performer named Nalini, led him into vanity, debt and eventually crime.

    Narayan writes with typical lightness, but the book poses serious questions about sincerity, performance and whether a role played long enough becomes real. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960, the first for an English-language novel, and inspired the 1965 Dev Anand film Guide.

    Book details

    AuthorR. K. Narayan
    First published1958
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)220
    SettingMalgudi and the village of Mangala, South India, mid-20th century
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1960

    Themes

    • Identity and performance
    • Redemption
    • Art and marriage
    • Faith
    • Self-deception

    Who should read it

    Readers who like gently ironic stories about reinvention and the line between faith and fraud.

  • The English Teacher

    Krishna teaches English literature at the Albert Mission College in Malgudi and lives a comfortable but dissatisfied bachelor life in the hostel. When his wife Susila and their baby daughter Leela come to join him, he rents a house and discovers the pleasures of domestic life: house-hunting, small quarrels, shared reading and the ordinary rituals of a young family.

    A sudden illness changes everything, and the second half of the novel follows Krishna as he struggles with loss, raises his daughter and becomes involved with a medium who claims to pass on messages. He also grows close to an unconventional headmaster running a school for small children, which makes him question the colonial English education he has spent his life delivering.

    The novel is Narayan's most personal, drawing on the death of his own wife Rajam in 1939. It completes a loose trilogy with Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts, and is notable for the tenderness with which it treats marriage and mourning. Its closing chapters are unusually spiritual for Narayan.

    Book details

    AuthorR. K. Narayan
    First published1945
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)184
    SettingMalgudi, South India, 1930s

    Themes

    • Grief
    • Marriage
    • Education
    • Spiritualism
    • Self-discovery

    Who should read it

    Readers looking for a quiet, moving novel about love, loss and starting again.

  • Untouchable

    Bakha is a young sweeper who cleans the public latrines of a town in colonial Punjab. He is strong, proud of his work and fascinated by the clothes and manners of the British soldiers in the nearby barracks. The novel follows him through a single day, from waking in his father's mud house in the outcastes' colony to nightfall.

    Over those hours Bakha is slapped for accidentally touching a caste Hindu, sees his sister harassed by a priest, is thrown scraps of food and listens to a Christian missionary's offer of salvation. Late in the day he hears Gandhi speak and encounters a poet who argues that the flush toilet could end the work of scavengers, offering three very different answers to his condition.

    Mulk Raj Anand's first novel, with a preface by E. M. Forster, was rejected by many publishers before appearing in 1935. Short and direct, it was one of the first English novels to give an untouchable protagonist an inner life, and it remains a key text on caste.

    Book details

    AuthorMulk Raj Anand
    First published1935
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)157
    SettingBulashah, a cantonment town in colonial Punjab, 1930s

    Themes

    • Untouchability
    • Caste discrimination
    • Dignity of labour
    • Gandhism
    • Social reform

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a short, powerful introduction to caste through the eyes of those who suffer it.

  • The Glass Palace

    When British troops march into Mandalay in 1885 and exile King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat to the Indian coast, an eleven-year-old Indian orphan named Rajkumar is working at a food stall in the city. In the chaos he glimpses Dolly, a young attendant to the royal family, and the encounter shapes the rest of his life as he rises through the Burmese teak trade.

    Amitav Ghosh follows Rajkumar, Dolly and their descendants, along with a Bengali widow named Uma and her family, through rubber plantations in Malaya, the royal exile at Ratnagiri, the Indian Army's dilemmas during the Second World War, and the forced trek out of Burma during the Japanese invasion. Photography and the Indian National Army become important threads in the later generations.

    Historical fiction on a grand scale, the novel explores how empire turned Indians into both its servants and its agents, and what loyalty means to soldiers in a colonial army. Ghosh famously withdrew it from the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, objecting to the term Commonwealth literature.

    Book details

    AuthorAmitav Ghosh
    First published2000
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)552
    SettingMandalay and Rangoon in Burma, Ratnagiri and Calcutta in India, and Malaya, 1885 to 1990s

    Themes

    • Empire and colonialism
    • Displacement
    • Loyalty
    • Family saga
    • Commerce

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy multigenerational epics and want to understand the shared colonial history of India and Burma.

  • The Hungry Tide

    Piya Roy, an American cetologist of Bengali descent, arrives in the Sundarbans to survey rare Irrawaddy dolphins. On a train from Calcutta she meets Kanai Dutt, a confident Delhi businessman and translator heading to the tide country to read a notebook left by his late uncle Nirmal, a schoolteacher and disillusioned Marxist.

    Unable to speak Bengali, Piya comes to depend on Fokir, an illiterate fisherman who knows the rivers by instinct, and an unspoken bond forms between them that unsettles Kanai. Nirmal's notebook, woven through the present-day story, recounts the 1979 events on Morichjhapi island, where refugees from Bangladesh tried to settle and were driven off by the state.

    The novel is part adventure, part ecological meditation on a landscape where islands appear and vanish and tigers kill villagers every year. Ghosh asks whose lives count when conservation and human survival collide, and he gives the mangrove forest itself the presence of a character.

    Book details

    AuthorAmitav Ghosh
    First published2004
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)333
    SettingThe Sundarbans and Lusibari island, West Bengal, 1979 and early 2000s

    Themes

    • Ecology and conservation
    • Refugees
    • Language and translation
    • Class
    • Nature's power

    Who should read it

    Readers drawn to nature writing and novels where landscape and politics are inseparable.

  • Sea of Poppies

    In 1838 the British East India Company forces Bihar's farmers to grow opium for the China trade. Deeti, a village woman married to a sick opium-factory worker, escapes a terrible fate with the help of Kalua, a giant ox-cart driver of low caste, and the pair end up among the indentured labourers being shipped to Mauritius aboard a former slave ship, the Ibis.

    The Ibis gathers a crowd of other refugees from their own lives: Zachary Reid, a mixed-race freedman from Baltimore passing as white; Neel Rattan Halder, a Bengali zamindar ruined by a British opium merchant; Paulette, a French orphan in disguise; and Jodu, her boyhood friend, along with lascars and a mysterious convict.

    The first volume of the Ibis trilogy, the novel delights in language, filling its pages with ship's pidgin, Bhojpuri and Anglo-Indian slang, while exposing the brutality of the opium economy. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008 and continues in River of Smoke and Flood of Fire.

    Book details

    AuthorAmitav Ghosh
    First published2008
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)515
    SettingBihar, Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal, 1838

    Themes

    • Opium trade
    • Indentured labour
    • Caste and reinvention
    • Colonial exploitation
    • Solidarity

    Who should read it

    Readers who love seafaring adventure and rich historical detail about the opium trade.

  • The Shadow Lines

    The narrator grows up in Calcutta idolising his uncle Tridib, a scholar who teaches him to imagine distant places precisely. Through Tridib he becomes fascinated with the Price family in London, especially May, a musician Tridib loved. In memory he travels back and forth between a 1960s childhood and student years in London, assembling a family story in fragments.

    His grandmother, a stern schoolteacher born in Dhaka, longs to bring an elderly uncle out of what has become East Pakistan. That journey, in 1964, coincides with communal riots on both sides of the border, an episode the narrator only gradually understands and that he must reconstruct from newspapers and the silences of the adults around him.

    Ghosh's second novel questions the lines drawn on maps and asks why violence on one side so precisely mirrors violence on the other. Written partly in response to the 1984 Delhi riots, it won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989 and is widely studied in Indian universities.

    Book details

    AuthorAmitav Ghosh
    First published1988
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)252
    SettingCalcutta, Dhaka and London, 1939 to early 1980s
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1989

    Themes

    • Borders and nationalism
    • Memory
    • Communal violence
    • Imagination
    • Partition

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in Partition's long shadow and novels built from memory rather than chronology.

  • Gun Island

    Deen Datta, a middle-aged Bengali dealer in rare books who divides his time between Brooklyn and Calcutta, hears on a visit home about a shrine in the Sundarbans tied to the legend of the Gun Merchant, a trader who tried to escape the wrath of Manasa Devi, goddess of snakes. A skeptic by temperament, he agrees to visit, and an unsettling encounter there starts a chain of coincidences.

    His search takes him to wildfire-threatened Los Angeles and to Venice, where Bangladeshi migrants work in the tourist trade. Along the way he meets Piya Roy from The Hungry Tide, a young Sundarbans boy named Tipu, a Venetian historian called Cinta, and a migrant named Rafi, and he begins to see the old myth as an account of displacement driven by a changing climate.

    The novel deliberately strains realism, turning to the uncanny to talk about a world where extreme weather seems to follow its own plot. It complements Ghosh's nonfiction book The Great Derangement, which argued that fiction has largely failed to confront climate change. Its mix of travelogue and parable may frustrate readers who want tight realism.

    Book details

    AuthorAmitav Ghosh
    First published2019
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)312
    SettingCalcutta, the Sundarbans, Los Angeles and Venice, late 2010s

    Themes

    • Climate change
    • Migration
    • Myth and modernity
    • Coincidence
    • Human trafficking

    Who should read it

    Readers looking for climate fiction that blends folklore, travel and the refugee crisis.

  • A Fine Balance

    In 1975, in an unnamed seaside city that is clearly Bombay, Dina Dalal, a Parsi widow determined not to depend on her brother, takes in work from an export firm. She hires two tailors, Ishvar Darji and his nephew Om, who have fled caste violence in their village, and rents a room to Maneck Kohlah, a student from a hill town whose family store is losing out to development.

    Mistry gives each character a long backstory, from the Chamaar family that defied caste by becoming tailors to Maneck's mountain childhood, before bringing them together in Dina's flat. As Indira Gandhi's Emergency unfolds, slum demolitions, forced sterilisation drives, bonded labour and petty officials press in from outside, and their fragile household is tested again and again.

    This is a big, compassionate novel about friendship and dignity under crushing systems, written in clear, unshowy prose. It won the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. Its emotional force is famous, and readers should be prepared for hardship.

    Book details

    AuthorRohinton Mistry
    First published1995
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)603
    SettingAn unnamed city by the sea (Bombay) and rural north India, 1940s to 1984, mainly 1975 to 1977
    AwardsGiller Prize 1995, Commonwealth Writers' Prize 1996

    Themes

    • The emergency
    • Caste oppression
    • Friendship
    • Poverty
    • Resilience

    Who should read it

    Readers who want an absorbing, humane epic about ordinary people living through India's Emergency.

  • A Suitable Boy

    Mrs Rupa Mehra has one aim as the novel opens in 1951: to find a suitable husband for her younger daughter Lata, a university student in the fictional Gangetic city of Brahmpur. Lata, thoughtful and wary of being managed, finds herself weighing three very different men, a charming Muslim classmate, a famous poet and a hard-working shoe-company manager.

    Around this courtship Vikram Seth builds a panoramic portrait of four families, the Mehras, Kapoors, Khans and Chatterjis, during India's first general election. Subplots follow the abolition of zamindari estates, a riot at a temple-mosque site, the leather and shoe trade, a courtesan's music, and a minister's wayward son, so politics and private life constantly brush against each other.

    At nearly 1,400 pages it is one of the longest single-volume novels in English, yet it reads easily, in clear, gently ironic prose with nineteenth-century patience. It won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the WH Smith Literary Award, and was adapted for BBC television by Mira Nair in 2020.

    Book details

    AuthorVikram Seth
    First published1993
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)1349
    SettingBrahmpur (fictional), Calcutta and Delhi, 1951 to 1952
    AwardsCommonwealth Writers' Prize 1994, WH Smith Literary Award 1994

    Themes

    • Arranged marriage
    • Post-independence politics
    • Hindu-muslim relations
    • Family duty
    • Choice and freedom

    Who should read it

    Readers who love long, immersive family novels in the tradition of Tolstoy and Austen, set in early independent India.