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Tag: Indian author

  • 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.

  • 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 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.

  • 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 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 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.

  • 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.