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Tag: Literary fiction

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Fire on the Mountain

    After a lifetime as the dutiful wife of a university vice-chancellor and mother of many children, Nanda Kaul has retreated to Carignano, an isolated house on a ridge in Kasauli. She wants nothing more than to be left alone with the pines and the view, and she resents any letter or visitor that might pull her back into obligation.

    Then her great-granddaughter Raka is sent to recover from typhoid and a troubled home. To Nanda's surprise, the child wants no attention at all and spends her days roaming ravines and burnt hillsides. Nanda finds herself trying to win the girl over with invented stories, while Ila Das, a childhood friend reduced to poverty, brings news of the dangers of the world below.

    Short and intense, the novel is a study of solitude, female lives and the pretences people build to survive them. It won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award, and its quiet build-up gives way to a powerful, unsettling conclusion best discovered without warning.

    Book details

    AuthorAnita Desai
    First published1977
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)145
    SettingCarignano, a house in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, 1970s
    AwardsWinifred Holtby Memorial Prize 1978, Sahitya Akademi Award 1978

    Themes

    • Solitude
    • Women's lives
    • Old age and childhood
    • Illusion
    • Loneliness

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy short, psychologically intense novels about women and solitude.

  • The Room on the Roof

    Rusty is a sixteen-year-old Anglo-Indian boy living in the European enclave of Dehra under the strict guardianship of Mr John Harrison, who forbids him to mix with Indians. Curiosity draws him into the bazaar, where he meets Somi, Ranbir and Suri, and discovers chaat, Holi colours and the warmth of friendship.

    After a final quarrel with his guardian, Rusty leaves home and is offered a room on the roof of the Kapoor family's house in exchange for teaching English to their son Kishen. There he falls in love with Kishen's lonely young mother, Meena, and has to learn what independence truly costs.

    Ruskin Bond wrote the novel at seventeen, partly from his own adolescence, and it won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Its simple, evocative prose and its picture of 1950s Dehra Dun introduced the Rusty stories that Bond would return to for decades, and it was adapted for Doordarshan as Ek Tha Rusty.

    Book details

    AuthorRuskin Bond
    First published1956
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    SettingDehra (Dehradun), early 1950s
    AwardsJohn Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1957

    Themes

    • Coming of age
    • Belonging
    • Friendship
    • First love
    • Anglo-indian identity

    Who should read it

    Teenagers and adults who enjoy gentle coming-of-age stories set in the hills of India.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Gun Island

    Deen Datta, a middle-aged Bengali dealer in rare books who divides his time between Brooklyn and Calcutta, hears on a visit home about a shrine in the Sundarbans tied to the legend of the Gun Merchant, a trader who tried to escape the wrath of Manasa Devi, goddess of snakes. A skeptic by temperament, he agrees to visit, and an unsettling encounter there starts a chain of coincidences.

    His search takes him to wildfire-threatened Los Angeles and to Venice, where Bangladeshi migrants work in the tourist trade. Along the way he meets Piya Roy from The Hungry Tide, a young Sundarbans boy named Tipu, a Venetian historian called Cinta, and a migrant named Rafi, and he begins to see the old myth as an account of displacement driven by a changing climate.

    The novel deliberately strains realism, turning to the uncanny to talk about a world where extreme weather seems to follow its own plot. It complements Ghosh's nonfiction book The Great Derangement, which argued that fiction has largely failed to confront climate change. Its mix of travelogue and parable may frustrate readers who want tight realism.

    Book details

    AuthorAmitav Ghosh
    First published2019
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)312
    SettingCalcutta, the Sundarbans, Los Angeles and Venice, late 2010s

    Themes

    • Climate change
    • Migration
    • Myth and modernity
    • Coincidence
    • Human trafficking

    Who should read it

    Readers looking for climate fiction that blends folklore, travel and the refugee crisis.

  • 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 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.