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  • Such a Long Journey

    Gustad Noble is a decent, proud bank clerk living with his wife Dilnavaz and three children in the Khodadad Building, a Parsi apartment block in Bombay. In 1971 a letter arrives from Major Jimmy Bilimoria, a friend who vanished years earlier, asking Gustad to deposit a large sum of money on behalf of a secret government operation linked to the coming war over East Pakistan.

    As Gustad tries to do his duty, his household is fraying: his eldest son Sohrab refuses the IIT place his father dreamed of, his daughter falls ill, and Dilnavaz turns to a neighbour's spells for help. Around them the building's eccentrics, including a pavement artist who paints gods on a wall, give the novel warmth and comedy.

    Mistry's first novel draws on the real Nagarwala bank fraud case and is affectionate about Parsi Bombay while sceptical of power. It won the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book and was shortlisted for the Booker; a film version appeared in 1998.

    Book details

    AuthorRohinton Mistry
    First published1991
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)339
    SettingKhodadad Building, Bombay, 1971
    AwardsGovernor General's Award 1991, Commonwealth Writers' Prize 1992

    Themes

    • Fathers and sons
    • Friendship and betrayal
    • Political corruption
    • Parsi community
    • Faith

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy warm, character-rich domestic novels with a political mystery underneath.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.