My favourite books from/about the Indian Subcontinent
Discover the best books from and about the Indian Subcontinent, featuring literary gems like A Suitable Boy, The God of Small Things, and The Moor's Last Sigh. Explore curated fiction from Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and more in this essential reading list for lovers of Indian literature.
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A Suitable Boy
by Vikram Seth
Tells the story of four large extended families in 1950s India against the political and religious upheavals of the time.
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The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
Set against a background of political turbulence in Kerala, this is the story of twins Esthappen and Rahel who try to craft a childhood for themselves amongst the vats of banana jam and heaps of peppercorns in their grandmother's factory.
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The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER ā¢ NATIONAL BESTSELLER ā¢ The bestselling author of Warlight traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. āA rare spellbinding web of dreams.ā āTime The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companionsāand whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.
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The Moor's Last Sigh
by Salman Rushdie
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ā¢ The Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. āFierce, phantasmagorical ā¦ a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel.ā āThe New York Times Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.
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Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee
by Meera Syal
An Indian "Waiting to Exhale", this hilarious and moving new novel by the award-winning author of "Anita and Me" is the indelible portrait of a group of Indian women living in London and what happens when one of them makes a documentary starring the other two.
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Deep River
by ShÅ«saku EndÅ
Offers a religious vision combining Christian faith with Buddhist acceptance in the story of a group of Japanese tourists who converge at the Ganges River in India.
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A Passage to India
by Edward Morgan Forster
Adela Quested arrives in Chandrapore, prepared to meet and marry a city magistrate who exemplifies the narrow-minded, anti-Indian prejudices of the imperial bureaucracy, but an expedition, led by the charming Dr Aziz, ends in an incident which quickens the pulse of Anglo-Indian mistrust.
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The Mistress of Spices
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
A classic work of magical realism, this bestselling novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni tells the story of Tilo, a young woman from another time who has a gift for the mystical art of spices. Now immortal, and living in the gnarled and arthritic body of an old woman, Tilo has set up shop in Oakland, California, where she administers curatives to her customers. But when she's surprised by an unexpected romance with a handsome stranger, she must choose between everlasting life and the vicissitudes of modern society. Spellbinding and hypnotizing, The Mistress of Spices is a tale of joy, sorrow, and one special woman's magical powers.
