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Tag: Booker shortlist

  • Clear Light of Day

    Tara, married to a diplomat and living abroad, returns with her family for a summer visit to the house in Old Delhi where she grew up. Her elder sister Bim still lives there, teaching history at a college and caring for their brother Baba, who has an intellectual disability and spends his days listening to old records.

    The novel moves back to the 1940s, when the siblings' parents were distant, an aunt raised them, and their brother Raja, a lover of Urdu poetry, fell ill and later left for Hyderabad to marry into a Muslim family. Bim has never quite forgiven him, and the story slowly uncovers how each sibling remembers those years differently.

    Anita Desai's prose is precise and luminous, alive to heat, gardens and the slow decay of a house. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980, it is often regarded as her finest novel, a study of time, family loyalty and forgiveness set against the upheaval of 1947.

    Book details

    AuthorAnita Desai
    First published1980
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)183
    SettingOld Delhi, the 1940s and the 1970s

    Themes

    • Sisterhood
    • Memory and time
    • Forgiveness
    • Partition
    • Duty

    Who should read it

    Readers who appreciate introspective family novels with exquisite, atmospheric prose.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 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.