Staff Picks
31 Outstanding Fiction Books by Indian Authors
- Mona Verma
- Monday, September 14, 2020
Collection
Mark Twain has said, "India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most artistic materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only!"
Apart from travel,the next best way to learn about a country and its people is through its books. India has several accomplished and award winning authors who have weaved magical works of fiction. These books spin stories with universal themes and take you on a ride from life in villages to the hustle and bustle of big cities, from the dazzling splendor of historical monuments to the glitz and glamour of Bollywood, from tales of immigrating to foreign lands to stories of political upheaval and unrest in the motherland, from arranged marriages to falling in love; every book in this list is eye opening, well written and worth reading.
Do browse this book list of Indian authors old and new; a mix of classics and contemporary fiction. You can learn more about a title by clicking on the link which will take you to its full display in our catalog. From here, you can also place holds on the books you wish to read.
Destination Wedding
A Novel
Published in 2020
"From the internationally bestselling author of The Windfall. . . . What could go wrong at a lavish Indian wedding with your best friend and your entire family? Tina Das wants to belong, but she just isn't sure where. India or America? Brooklyn or Bombay?Manhattan or Delhi? Or start from scratch in London--she still has fond memories of her one-night stand with Rocco Gallagher, the handsome Australian, as they traipsed through Covent Garden and Seven Dials, but he never called back so maybe it's time tolet that dream go, and focus on finding the next big story for her streaming network instead. She's hoping she'll find it at her cousin's lavish, weeklong Delhi wedding, and has taken her best friend Marianne Laing along for the ride to Delhi's poshest country club, Colebrookes. Marianne has always had international tastes, in life and in love, yet can't help but think of sweet, steady, khaki-clad Tom back home in New York. Also in attendance are Tina's divorced parents: her mother, Radha, who's bringingher American "boyfriend," David, to the wedding, and her father, Neel, who's using the visit to India to explore the idea of dating again, only to discover it and he have both changed completely in the decades he's been away. Infused with warmth, charm, and wicked humor, Destination Wedding grapples with the challenges of work, love, and finding the people who make a place feel like home"-- Provided by publisher.
Fasting, Feasting
Published in 2000
The story of "Uma, the plain older daughter of an Indian family, tied to the household of her childhood and tending to her parents' every extravagant demand, and of her younger brother, Arun, across the world in Massachusetts, bewildered by his new life in college and the suburbs, where he lives with the Patton family."--Cover.
The Inheritance of Loss
Published in 2006
In a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai.
One Amazing Thing
Published in 2009
Late afternoon in a passport and visa office in California, nine people are in the office when an earthquake rips through the building trapping these nine together struggling to survive.
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
Published in 2017
After her father's death, Nikki, who has spent most of her life distancing herself from the traditional Sikh community, takes a job teaching a creative writing course in the heart of the Punjabi community.
Train to Pakistan
Published in 2015
"In the summer of 1947, when the creation of the new state of Pakistan was formally announced, ten million people-Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs-were in flight, By the time the monsoon broke, almost a million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in terror, or in hiding. The only remaining oases of peace were a scatter of little villages lost in the remote reaches of the frontier. One of these villages was Mano Majra." It is a place, Khushwant Singh goes on to tell us at the beginning of this classic novel, where Sikhs and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds of years. Then one day, at the end of the summer, the "ghost train" arrives, a silent, incredible funeral train loaded with the bodies of thousands of refugees, bringing the village its first taste of the horrors of the civil war. Train to Pakistan is the story of this isolated village that is plunged into the abyss of religious hate. It is also the story of a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl whose love endures and transcends the ravages of war.
Partitions
A Novel
Published in 2011
As India is rent into two nations, communal violence breaks out on both sides of the new border and streaming hordes of refugees flee from blood and chaos. At an overrun train station, Shankar and Keshav, twin Hindu boys, lose sight of their mother and join the human mass to go in search of her. A young Sikh girl, Simran Kaur, has run away from her father, who would rather poison his daughter than see her defiled. And Ibrahim Masud, an elderly Muslim doctor driven from the town of his birth, limps toward the new Muslim state of Pakistan, rediscovering on the way his role as a healer. As the displaced face a variety of horrors, this unlikely quartet comes together, defying every rule of self-preservation to forge a future of hope.
A Burning
Published in 2020
For readers of Tommy Orange, Yaa Gyasi, and Jhumpa Lahiri, an electrifying debut novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise—to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies—and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India. Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely—an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor—has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear. Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut. A novel about fate, power, opportunity, and class; about innocence and guilt, betrayal and love, and the corrosive media cycle that manufactures falsehoods masquerading as truths— A Burning is a debut novel of exceptional power and urgency, haunting and beautiful, brutal, vibrant, impossible to forget.
Nectar in a Sieve
Published in 2013
In a small village in India, a simple peasant woman recalls her life as a child bride, a farmer's wife, and a devoted mother amidst fights to meet changing times, poverty, and disaster.
When Dimple Met Rishi
Published in 2017
When Dimple Shah and Rishi Patel meet at a Stanford University summer program, Dimple is avoiding her parents' obsession with "marriage prospects" but Rishi hopes to woo her into accepting an arranged marriage with him.
A Fine Balance
Published in 2010
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance From the Trade Paperback edition.
A Rising Man
Published in 2017
In the days of the British Raj in 1919, Captain Sam Wyndham, a former Scotland Yard detective newly arrived in Calcutta, is confronted with the murder of a British official who was found with a note in his mouth warning the British to leave India.
Miss New India
Published in 2011
Taken under the wing of an expat teacher for her ambition and talent, Anjali Bose hopes to escape unfavorable prospects and falls in with a crowd of young people in Bangalore, where she endeavors to confront her past and reinvent herself.
The Lives of Others
Published in 2014
Chronicles the vicissitudes of the extended Ghosh family as internal rivalries accompany the implosion of the family business and external social unrest.
A House for Mr. Biswas
Published in 2001
Owning a small portion of the Trinidad earth and a respectable house of his own is the dream that sustains Mohun Biswas through a life of frustration and despair after he marries into the domineering Tulsi family.
You Bring the Distant Near
Published in 2017
From 1965 through the present, an Indian American family adjusts to life in New York City, alternately fending off and welcoming challenges to their own traditions.
Girl Gone Viral
A Novel
Published in 2020
A live-tweet event goes viral for a camera-shy ex-model, shoving her into the spotlight-and into the arms of the bodyguard she'd been pining for.
Midnight's Children
Published in 1995
From the Publisher: A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the "bomb of Bombay" chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947-and examines a whole people's capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing new ones.
The Year of the Runaways
Published in 2016
The lives of three young men, and one unforgettable woman, intertwine over the course of one year after they immigrate from India to Sheffield, England.
Narcopolis
Published in 2012
A tale of vice and passion set against a backdrop of late 1970s Bombay finds a New Yorker becoming entranced with the underworld culture of an opium den and brothel where he encounters a pipe-making eunuch, a violent businessman, and a Chinese refugee.
The Space Between Us
Published in 2005
Captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two women--Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.
The Far Field
A Novel
Published in 2019
"Gorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize-winner Madhuri Vijay's The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present. In the wake of her mother's death, Kalyani, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Kalyani is brought face to face with Kashmir's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Kalyani finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion"-- Provided by publisher.