My India Reading List
Discover the ultimate 'My India Reading List' with top book recommendations to explore India's rich culture, history, and diversity. Perfect for book lovers!
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The Glass Palace
by Amitav Ghosh
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND LOS ANGELES TIMES “A rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland— a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls “a master storyteller.” Praise for The Glass Palace “An absorbing story of a world in transition, brought to life through characters who love and suffer with equal intensity.”—J. M. Coetzee “There is no denying Ghosh’s command of culture and history. . . . [He] proves a writer of supreme skill and intelligence.”—The Atlantic Monthly “I will never forget the young and old Rajkumar, Dolly, the Princesses, the forests of teak, the wealth that made families and wars. A wonderful novel. An incredible story.”—Grace Paley “A novelist of dazzling ingenuity.”—San Francisco Chronicle
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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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Holy Cow
by Sarah Macdonald
In her twenties, journalist Sarah Macdonald backpacked around India and came away with a lasting impression of heat, pollution and poverty. So when an airport beggar read her palm and told her she would return to India—and for love—she screamed, “Never!” and gave the country, and him, the finger. But eleven years later, the prophecy comes true. When the love of Sarah’s life is posted to India, she quits her dream job to move to the most polluted city on earth, New Delhi. For Sarah this seems like the ultimate sacrifice for love, and it almost kills her, literally. Just settled, she falls dangerously ill with double pneumonia, an experience that compels her to face some serious questions about her own fragile mortality and inner spiritual void. “I must find peace in the only place possible in India,” she concludes. “Within.” Thus begins her journey of discovery through India in search of the meaning of life and death. Holy Cow is Macdonald’s often hilarious chronicle of her adventures in a land of chaos and contradiction, of encounters with Hinduism, Islam and Jainism, Sufis, Sikhs, Parsis and Christians and a kaleidoscope of yogis, swamis and Bollywood stars. From spiritual retreats and crumbling nirvanas to war zones and New Delhi nightclubs, it is a journey that only a woman on a mission to save her soul, her love life—and her sanity—can survive.
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The Death of Vishnu
by Manil Suri
Suffused with Hindu mythology, this bestselling story of one apartment building becomes a metaphor for the social and religious divisions of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the soul's progress through the various stages of existence.
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In a Free State
by V. S. Naipaul
No writer has rendered our boundariless, post-colonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives. In the beginning it is just a car trip through Africa. Two English people—Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys, and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife”—are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home. By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In A Free State is Naipaul at his best.
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The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
A young man born of Indian parents in America struggles with issues of identity from his teens to his thirties.
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The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene
An assistant police commissioner in a West African coastal town lets passion overrule his honor.
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Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and a baffling new world, the characters in Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.
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Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
The story of Saleem Sinal, born precisely at midnight, August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Saleem's life parallels the history of his nation.
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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 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 Moor's Last Sigh
by Salman Rushdie
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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. “Fierce, phantasmagorical … a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel.” —The 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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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.
