Fiction > Indian / Pakistani Fiction

Opening and closing with a wedding, this novel is ostensibly the story of a Hindu family trying to find a suitable husband for their younger daughter, Lata. Who will the suitable boy turn out to be? The dashing Kabir, with whom Lata falls in love? The ambitious businessman whom Lata's mother favors? Or the sophisticated poet her relatives choose? The interwoven stories of four families linked by marriage form the background for this marital quest. It proves slow-moving at first, but the patient reader will inevitably be caught up i... read more

Welcome to the Shahjahan, one of Calcutta's oldest and most venerable hotels. In "Chowringhee", the Shahjahan's new receptionist regales his audience with stories of the people who spend their days and nights within the Shahjahan's grand facade. Like Bengal itself, this is a place where greed, seduction and death live alongside love, luxury and pride. With wit, warmth, and ferocious energy, "Chowringhee" reveals to us an entire universe. One of the great novels of contemporary Indian literature, it presents a glittering vision of a... read more

Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that wo... read more

Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur and murderer. Balram, the White Tiger, was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream of escape. When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi behind the wheel of a Honda. Amid the cockroaches and call-centres, the 36,000,004 gods, the slums, the shopping malls, and the crippl... read more

MURDER, MOONLIGHT, THE JUNGLE CROWDING CLOSE...The place is Ceylon, the time the 1930s. Set amid tea plantations, decay and corruption, this sinuous, subtle, surprising novel is a masterly evocation of time and place, of colonialism and the backwash of empire. It is the story of an embittered Ceylonese lawyer, Sam Obeysekere himself a product of empire - 'obey' by name and by nature - and of a family that once had wealth and influence but starts to crack open when Sam's charismatic father dies leaving gambling debts, an ex-beauty o... read more

Ever since he can remember, Animal has gone on all fours, the catastrophic result of what happened on That Night when, thanks to an American chemical company, the Apocalypse visited his slum. Now not quite twenty, he leads a hand-to-mouth existence with his dog Jara and a crazy old nun called Ma Franci, and spends his nights fantasising about Nisha, the daughter of a local musician, and wondering what it must be like to get laid. When a young American doctor, Elli Barber, comes to town to open a free clinic for the still suffering ... read more

No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses", which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plumm... read more

Winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize Kiran Desai's first novel, "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard," was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life. In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge's chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his ... read more

It is India, 1955: as the scars of Partition are just beginning to heal, in Ramjas College, Delhi, seventeen-year-old Meera is enraptured. In a spotlight, a handsome young man, Dev, is singing a song that is redolent with a longing, a hunger, that is thrillingly new to her. Beside her sits her older sister Roopa: the favourite, the beauty, her fairness tonight enhanced by clusters of gold at her ears, and a glossy streak of forbidden lipstick. Later, jilted by Roopa, it is to Meera that Dev turns for comfort. Though their hasty mar... read more

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Reef comes a novel about cricket, growing up and falling in loveSunny is Sri Lankan and nearly fifteen years old. It is the late sixties, and his father has moved the two of them to Manila, after his mother's death. Sunny decides to start a cricket team with the other Sri Lankans to get the attention of his attractive neighbour. But even when first love goes wrong, his passion for cricket remains, the only connection he has to the home he left behind.Sunny goes on to attend university in London... read more

For decades they have remained close, sharing recipes, customs and the challenges of women shaped by ancient ways yet living modern lives. They are the Hindi-Bindi Club, a nickname given by their daughters to the mothers who left India to start anew in America daughters now grown, and facing struggles of their own. For Kiran, Preity, and Rani, adulthood means seeking a balance, from the ways they tweak their mothers' cooking to suit their Western lifestyles to the ways they reject their parents' most fervent beliefs. Now, bearing t... read more

Fourteen years ago Aasmaani's mother Samina, a blazing beauty and fearless activist, walked out of her house and was never seen again. Aasmaani refuses to believe she is dead and still dreams of her glorious return. Now grown up and living in Karachi, Aasmaani receives what could be the longed-for proof that her mother is still alive. As she comes closer to the truth she is also irresistibly drawn to Ed, her ally and sparring partner, and the only person who can understand the profound hurt - and the profound love - that drives her... read more

The Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi's first novel, is a tour de force of comic invention, a bizarre, often hilarious, and totally original picture of the life of a young Pakistani growing up in 1970s Britain.Karim lives with his Mum and Dad in a suburb of south London and dreams of making his escape to the bright lights of the big city. But his father is no ordinary Dad, he is 'the Buddha of suburbia', a strange and compelling figure whose powers of meditation hold a circle of would-be mystics spellbound with the fascinations of... read more

"Such a Long Journey" is set in (what was then) Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent and the birth of Bangladesh, telling the story of the peculiar way in which the conflict impinges on the lives of Gustad Noble, an ordinary man, and his family. It was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, and won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize. First published 1991.

Here is a wonderful introduction to the residents of Firozsha Baag, an apartment complex in Bombay. We enter the daily routine and rhythm of their lives, and by the time we reach the final story we are as familiar with the people of Firozsha Baag as we are with our own neighbours. The crowded, throbbing life of India is brilliantly captured in this series of stories.

Set in (what was then) Bombay against the backdrop of war in the Indian subcontinent and the birth of Bangladesh, telling the story of the peculiar way in which the conflict impinges on the lives of Gustad Noble, an ordinary man, and his family.

In an unnamed town in England Jugnu and his lover Chanda have disappeared. Rumours abound in the close-knit Pakistani community, and then on a snow-covered January morning Chanda's brothers are arrested for their murder. Maps for Lost Lovers tells the story of the next twelve months. What follows is an unravelling of all that is sacred to Jugnu's brother and sister-in-law, Shamas and Kaukab. As the seasons pass Kaukab tries desperately to maintain her Islamic piety as she struggles to come to terms with the double murder and its co... read more

Winner of the 2005 Kiriyama PrizeAn exquisitely written novel exploring a family at the crossroads of culture, community, nationality and religion 'Despite the violence that lies at the heart of this novel, it is a celebration of love and life... This is that rare sort of book that gives a voice to those whose voices are seldom heard.' - Observer At the heart of this extraordinary novel lies the character of Kaukab, a wife and mother increasingly out of touch with those she loves most: her homeland, her husband and her three i... read more

Nariman Vakeel, a seventy-nine-year-old Parsi widower, beset by Parkinson's disease and haunted by memories of the past, lives in a once-elegant apartment with his two middle-aged stepchildren. When his condition worsens he is forced to take up residence with Roxana, his own daughter, her husband, Yezad, and their two young sons. The effect of the new responsibility on Yezad, who is already besieged by financial worries, pushes him into a scheme of deception. This sets in motion a series of events - a great unravelling and a revela... read more

After years of failure at school and work, and of spending his days dreaming in the tea stalls and singing to himself in the public gardens, it doesn't seem as if post-office clerk Sampath Chawla is going to amount to much. But then he climbs a guava tree and becomes unexpectedly famous as a guru.