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Tag: Bombay

  • Em and the Big Hoom

    The unnamed narrator lives with his sister Susan and their parents in a cramped flat in Mahim, Bombay. His mother Imelda, called Em, smokes beedis, swears inventively and talks with startling candour, and she lives with bipolar disorder that sends her into periods of mania and despair, including attempts on her own life. His father Augustine, the Big Hoom, is calm, reliable and quietly devoted.

    Through Em's letters, diaries and long conversations with her son, the novel pieces together how Em and the Big Hoom met and married in the 1950s and how the family lives around her illness, with hospital visits, neighbours' gossip and endless cups of tea. Humour sits right beside sorrow on every page.

    Jerry Pinto drew on his own family history, and the book is admired for its honesty about mental illness and its love for its characters. It won The Hindu Literary Prize and the Crossword Book Award and has been translated into several languages. It is short and quickly read.

    Book details

    AuthorJerry Pinto
    First published2012
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)240
    SettingMahim, Bombay, 1950s to 1990s
    AwardsThe Hindu Literary Prize 2013

    Themes

    • Mental illness
    • Family love
    • Caregiving
    • Humour and grief
    • Marriage

    Who should read it

    Readers who appreciate warm, honest writing about families living with mental illness.

  • Shantaram

    Lin, an Australian heroin addict and armed robber, escapes from prison and flies to Bombay on a false passport in the early 1980s. A street guide named Prabaker befriends him, takes him to his home village, and helps him settle into a slum where Lin opens a free clinic for its residents and receives the name Shantaram.

    Lin falls for Karla, an enigmatic Swiss-American woman in the expatriate crowd at Leopold's cafe, and is drawn into the circle of Abdel Khader Khan, a philosophical mafia boss. He works in currency black markets and passport forgery, survives a brutal stint in Arthur Road prison, and eventually joins a mission into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

    Gregory David Roberts drew on his own escape from an Australian prison and years in Bombay, although how much is literal remains debated. The book is long, emotional and full of aphorisms; many readers adore its love for the city, while others find it overwritten. An Apple TV+ series followed in 2022.

    Book details

    AuthorGregory David Roberts
    First published2003
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)933
    SettingBombay and a village in Maharashtra, and Afghanistan, 1980s

    Themes

    • Redemption
    • Exile and fugitive life
    • Love
    • Crime and morality
    • Friendship

    Who should read it

    Readers who want an immersive, romantic adventure through 1980s Bombay and don't mind length.

  • 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.

  • Family Matters

    Nariman Vakeel, a retired English professor of seventy-nine, lives in a large flat in Chateau Felicity with his two middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy and Jal. After he breaks his ankle on an evening walk, Coomy contrives to move him to the two-room flat of his daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad and their two sons in Pleasant Villa.

    The burden of nursing an invalid, and the cost of his medicines, pushes Yezad, an assistant in a sports shop, towards a reckless plan involving his employer and the Shiv Sena's hold on the city. Flashbacks show the forbidden love affair that Nariman was made to give up in his youth, a wound that still shapes every relationship in the family.

    Mistry writes about old age, duty and the slow business of caring with patience and gentle comedy, especially through Roxana's young son Jehangir. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, it is also a portrait of 1990s Bombay and of a Parsi community worried about its own survival.

    Book details

    AuthorRohinton Mistry
    First published2002
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)487
    SettingBombay, mid-1990s, with flashbacks to the 1940s and 1950s

    Themes

    • Caring for the elderly
    • Family obligation
    • Religious orthodoxy
    • Communal politics
    • Regret

    Who should read it

    Anyone who has looked after an ageing parent, or who loves quiet, tender family novels.

  • 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 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.