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Tag: Literary fiction

  • The City of Joy

    First published in French in 1985, The City of Joy is set in Anand Nagar, a crowded slum in Howrah across the river from Calcutta. Lapierre based his book on years of research and on real people, whose names and details he altered, and wrote it in a novelistic style that blurs reportage and fiction.

    Three main figures carry the narrative. Stephan Kovalski, a Polish Catholic priest, chooses to live among the slum's residents rather than minister to them from outside. Hasari Pal, a farmer driven from his Bengal village by drought and debt, becomes a rickshaw puller in the city. Max Loeb, a young American doctor, arrives to help run a clinic and confronts leprosy, cholera, monsoon floods and the slum's own mafia.

    The book was a worldwide bestseller and was filmed by Roland Joffe in 1992. Some Indian critics objected to its portrayal of Calcutta as a byword for misery, while admirers praised its insistence on the dignity, humour and solidarity of the poor. Lapierre donated a large share of his royalties to charitable work in the region.

    Book details

    AuthorDominique Lapierre
    First published1985
    Original languageFrench
    Translated byKathryn Spink
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)470
    SettingAnand Nagar slum, Howrah, near Calcutta, 1970s and early 1980s

    Themes

    • Poverty and resilience
    • Faith and service
    • Migration from countryside to city
    • Solidarity
    • Human dignity

    Who should read it

    Readers moved by stories of courage in hardship, with an awareness of the outsider's lens it brings to Calcutta.

    If you liked this, try

    • Freedom at Midnight
    • Shantaram
    • Behind the Beautiful Forevers

  • Aadha Gaon

    Aadha Gaon, meaning half a village, was published in 1966 and is set in Gangauli, the author's own village in the Ghazipur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh. It portrays the Shia Muslim zamindar families of one half of the village, their feuds, marriages, scandals and Muharram mourning rituals, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.

    There is no single hero; the village itself is the protagonist, observed by a narrator who grew up there. When the Muslim League's campaign for Pakistan reaches Gangauli, most villagers cannot see why their home should be anywhere else. Partition divides families nonetheless, and then the abolition of zamindari strips the landowners of their status, leaving them adrift in the new republic.

    Written in Hindi but full of the Bhojpuri and Urdu of everyday speech, the novel was controversial for its frank language and its insistence that Indian Muslims belong to their soil. It is now recognised as one of the great Hindi novels about Partition from a Muslim village's perspective. Gillian Wright translated it as A Village Divided.

    Book details

    AuthorRahi Masoom Raza
    First published1966
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byGillian Wright
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)360
    SettingGangauli village, Ghazipur district, Uttar Pradesh, late 1930s to early 1950s

    Themes

    • Partition
    • Belonging and homeland
    • End of zamindari
    • Shia Muslim culture
    • Village community

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a rarely told Muslim village view of Partition and its aftermath in North India.

    If you liked this, try

    • Tamas
    • Raag Darbari
    • Basti

  • Raag Darbari

    Ranganath, a history postgraduate, comes from the city to recover his health in Shivpalganj, a village in Uttar Pradesh where his uncle Vaidyaji lives. Vaidyaji is an Ayurvedic physician in name, but his real practice is power: he controls the village college, the cooperative society and, through allies, the panchayat. Ranganath's idealism wilts as he watches how things actually get done.

    The novel follows a parade of characters: Vaidyaji's sons, the strongman Badri and the swaggering student leader Ruppan, the hanger-on Sanichar who is installed as a puppet village head, the harried principal and squabbling teachers, the police, the clerks and the litigants who spend their lives in court. Every institution of the new republic is shown being bent to faction and self-interest.

    Published in 1968 and awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1970, the book is wickedly funny line by line, with an irony that never lets up. It has been read as the definitive portrait of rural India's political culture, and much of it still feels current. Gillian Wright translated it into English, and a television serial was made in the 1980s.

    Book details

    AuthorShrilal Shukla
    First published1968
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byGillian Wright
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)340
    SettingShivpalganj, a village in Uttar Pradesh, 1960s
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1970

    Themes

    • Corruption
    • Rural politics
    • Decay of institutions
    • Education system
    • Disillusionment

    Who should read it

    Anyone who wants to understand, and laugh bitterly at, how power works in small-town India.

    If you liked this, try

    • Batatyachi Chaal
    • Aadha Gaon
    • Godaan

  • Samskara

    In the agrahara of Durvasapura, a settlement of Madhva Brahmins in Karnataka, a man named Naranappa dies of fever. He had defied every rule of his caste: he ate meat, drank, lived with a low-caste woman named Chandri and mocked the elders. Yet he was never formally expelled, so the question of who may cremate him becomes a scriptural puzzle while his body lies decaying in the heat.

    The community turns to Praneshacharya, a celebrated scholar of the Vedas, admired for his austerity and his devotion to an invalid wife. He searches the sacred texts and finds no answer. The waiting breeds plague, greed and hypocrisy among the Brahmins, and Praneshacharya himself is shaken by an encounter that tests his long suppression of desire.

    Published in 1965, the novel is short and densely symbolic; samskara can mean both a funeral rite and the shaping of the self. It became a landmark of the Kannada Navya movement, was filmed in 1970 amid controversy, and reached world readers through A. K. Ramanujan's 1976 English translation. It remains a sharp examination of orthodoxy, purity and the inner life of faith.

    Book details

    AuthorU. R. Ananthamurthy
    First published1965
    Original languageKannada
    Translated byA. K. Ramanujan
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)140
    SettingDurvasapura, a Brahmin agrahara in the Malnad region of Karnataka

    Themes

    • Orthodoxy and rebellion
    • Purity and pollution
    • Desire and asceticism
    • Caste
    • Spiritual crisis

    Who should read it

    Readers wanting a compact, provocative novel about religious authority and individual conscience.

    If you liked this, try

    • Gora
    • Parva
    • Siddhartha

  • Aranyak

    Aranyak, which means of the forest, is narrated by Satyacharan, a jobless graduate from Calcutta who accepts a post as manager of a vast estate in the jungles of Bhagalpur and Purnia in Bihar during the 1920s. His task is to lease the forest out to tenant farmers, which means overseeing its destruction. At first he is lonely and homesick for the city.

    Over six years he comes to love the silent grasslands, moonlit hills and wild flowers, and the people who live on the margins: landless labourers, a destitute schoolteacher, a botanist who plants seeds in the forest, a tribal king descended from a once-proud dynasty, and an old man who hoards grain. Their poverty and dignity are drawn with compassion and without condescension.

    The novel is loosely plotted, almost a sequence of sketches, and its tone is elegiac. Long before ecology became a public cause, it registered the price of turning forest into farmland and the guilt of a man who loves what he helps to erase. Rimli Bhattacharya's English version is subtitled Of the Forest, and the book is often read as an early Indian work of environmental literature.

    Book details

    AuthorBibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
    First published1939
    Original languageBengali
    Translated byRimli Bhattacharya
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)250
    SettingForests of Bhagalpur and Purnia, Bihar, 1920s

    Themes

    • Wilderness
    • Deforestation
    • Tribal and landless communities
    • Solitude
    • Guilt of progress

    Who should read it

    Readers drawn to nature writing and quiet, reflective novels about humanity's relationship with the land.

    If you liked this, try

    • Pather Panchali
    • The Hungry Tide
    • Walden

  • Tomb of Sand

    After her husband's death, Ma, an elderly woman in a north Indian family, takes to her bed and turns her back on the household gathered around her. When she finally rises, it is as a changed person: playful, unpredictable and keen to do things her family never imagined, including moving in with her unconventional daughter, Beti, a writer who lives independently.

    Ma's new friendship with Rosie, a hijra, adds to the family's confusion, and her desire to cross the border into Pakistan leads her back to a past from the time of Partition that she has never spoken about. Beti, who has always been the free one, finds herself watching her mother outdo her in rebellion.

    Originally published in Hindi as Ret Samadhi, the novel is playful and digressive, with talking crows, puns and stories within stories. Daisy Rockwell's translation won the International Booker Prize in 2022, the first time the award went to a book translated from an Indian language.

    Book details

    AuthorGeetanjali Shree
    First published2018
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byDaisy Rockwell
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    SettingDelhi and northern India, and Pakistan, present day
    AwardsInternational Booker Prize 2022

    Themes

    • Old age and renewal
    • Mothers and daughters
    • Partition memory
    • Borders
    • Gender

    Who should read it

    Adventurous readers who enjoy playful, experimental prose and stories about women reclaiming their lives.

    If you liked this, try

    • Ghachar Ghochar
    • The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
    • Train to Pakistan

  • Ghachar Ghochar

    The narrator, an unnamed young man in Bangalore, spends his afternoons at a coffee house watching the world and taking advice from a waiter named Vincent. He lives with his parents, his sister Malati and his uncle Chikkappa, whose spice trading business lifted the family from a cramped, ant-infested rented house into a bigger home and an easy life.

    The narrator nominally works for the business but does nothing; the family depends on Chikkappa and protects him fiercely. When the narrator marries Anita, a woman with firm principles who refuses to accept how things are done, her presence exposes the family's moral compromises and the quiet menace that holds it together.

    Vivek Shanbhag's novella, originally written in Kannada and translated into English by Srinath Perur, is short, wry and precise, with tension built from small domestic details. It drew international praise when it appeared in the UK and US in 2017, and its title is a made-up phrase for something hopelessly entangled.

    Book details

    AuthorVivek Shanbhag
    First published2013
    Original languageKannada
    Translated bySrinath Perur
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)118
    SettingBangalore, early 21st century

    Themes

    • Money and morality
    • Family loyalty
    • Class mobility
    • Complicity
    • Marriage

    Who should read it

    Readers who like short, unsettling literary fiction about how money reshapes a family.

    If you liked this, try

    • Tomb of Sand
    • The White Tiger
    • Em and the Big Hoom

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • Family Matters
    • The English Teacher
    • Ghachar Ghochar

  • Sister of My Heart

    Anju and Sudha are born on the same night into the Chatterjee household in Calcutta, on the day their fathers disappeared on a mysterious expedition. Raised together by three widowed women in a decaying mansion, they are closer than sisters, though they could not be more different: Anju is bookish and outspoken, Sudha beautiful and romantic.

    As they grow up, a family secret about Sudha's father threatens their bond, and arranged marriages pull them apart. Sudha marries into a traditional family in a provincial town ruled by a domineering mother-in-law, while Anju moves to California with her husband and struggles with the loneliness of immigrant life.

    Told in alternating voices, the novel draws on Bengali folk tales and explores female friendship, the pressures on women to produce sons and the different trap each life presents. Its sequel, The Vine of Desire, continues the cousins' story. It suits readers who enjoy emotional, character-driven stories of women's lives across continents.

    Book details

    AuthorChitra Banerjee Divakaruni
    First published1999
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)322
    SettingCalcutta, a town in Bengal and California, 1970s to 1990s

    Themes

    • Female friendship
    • Arranged marriage
    • Family secrets
    • Immigration
    • Motherhood

    Who should read it

    Readers who love stories of sisterhood and women navigating tradition and choice.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Palace of Illusions
    • The Namesake
    • Clear Light of Day

  • The 3 Mistakes of My Life

    Govind Patel, a maths-loving young man from a modest Ahmedabad family, dreams of running a business. With his friends Ishaan, a cricket fanatic whose own playing career stalled, and Omi, the son of a temple priest, he opens a small cricket-goods shop in the temple compound, and the three begin coaching boys in the neighbourhood.

    They discover Ali, a Muslim boy with an extraordinary batting talent, and Ishaan becomes determined to help him reach the national team. Meanwhile Govind tutors Ishaan's sister Vidya in maths, and a secret romance begins. The 2001 Gujarat earthquake, rising political tension and the Godhra train burning of 2002 push the friends into situations that test their loyalty.

    Framed as a story Govind tells the author after a suicide attempt, the novel mixes business ambition, cricket and romance with communal violence. It was adapted into the acclaimed 2013 film Kai Po Che! It is among Bhagat's darker books, and its treatment of the riots gives it more weight than his campus comedies.

    Book details

    AuthorChetan Bhagat
    First published2008
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)258
    SettingAhmedabad, Gujarat, 2000 to 2002

    Themes

    • Friendship
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Communal violence
    • Cricket
    • Secret romance

    Who should read it

    Young readers who like fast, accessible fiction about friendship and ambition against a real backdrop.

    If you liked this, try

    • Five Point Someone
    • 2 States
    • Train to Pakistan