The Marriage Bureau for Rich People
10 best books like The Marriage Bureau for Rich People (Farahad Zama): The Hindi-Bindi Club, Queen of Dreams, Love Marriage, In the Convent of Little Flowers: Stories, Someone Else's Garden, Darjeeling, Jana Bibi's Excellent Fortunes, Chef, The Blue Bedspread, Family Planning
For decades they have remained close, sharing treasured recipes, honored 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 American daughters to the mothers who left India to start anew—daughters now grown...
| Author | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni |
| ISBN | 1400030447 |
From the bestselling author of Sister of My Heart comes a spellbinding tale of mothers and daughters, love and cultural identity. Rakhi, a young painter and single mother, is struggling to come to terms with her relationship with ex-husband Sonny, a hip Bay Area DJ, and with her dream-teller mother,...
| Author | V.V. Ganeshananthan |
| ISBN | 1400066697 |
In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak of only two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first toward the second. [p. 3]
The daughter...
| Author | Indu Sundaresan |
| ISBN | 1416586091 |
Bestselling author Indu Sundaresan presents a candid and stunning collection of stories about contemporary Indians and the cutting-edge issues surrounding them where ancient tradition and modernity can often clash.A young woman who was adopted by an American family in Seattle receives a letter...
| Author | Dipika Rai |
| ISBN | 0062000357 |
In the vein of Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us, Dipika Rai’s soulful debut novel is a moving multi-generational tale of mothers and daughters in rural India struggling to break free of the social traditions fencing them in. Standing out among works by Shobhan Bantwal, Chitra Divakaruni,...
| Author | Bharti Kirchner |
| ISBN | 0312316062 |
Novelist and award-winning cookbook author Bharti Kirchner has written a sweeping family saga, a first class fiction about forbidden love and family honor.
Set in the mountainous tea plantations of Darjeeling, India and in New York City, Darjeeling is the story of two sisters - Aloka and...
| Author | Betsy Woodman |
| ISBN | 0805093494 |
Meet Jana Bibi, a Scottish woman helping to save the small town in India she has grown to call home and the oddball characters she considers family
Janet Laird's life changed the day she inherited her grandfather's house in a faraway Indian hill station. Ignoring her son's arguments to come...
| Author | Jaspreet Singh |
| ISBN | 1608190854 |
Kirpal Singh is riding the slow train to Kashmir. With India passing by his window, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years.
Kirpal, called Kip, is shy and not yet twenty when he arrives for the first time at General...
| Author | Raj Kamal Jha |
| ISBN | 0156010887 |
In the middle of a steamy Calcutta night the phone rings. An unnamed man in a city of millions answers to a voice telling him that his long-lost sister is dead. He must go to the hospital to identify the body and claim his sister's orphaned newborn daughter until she can be adopted the next day.
During...
Rakesh Ahuja, a Government Minister in New Delhi, is beset by problems: thirteen children and another on the way; a wife who mourns the loss of her favorite TV star; and a teenaged son with some really strong opinions about family planning.
To make matters worse, looming over this comical farrago...
| Author | Anjali Banerjee |
| ISBN | 1416509437 |
This charming novel about a Bengali-American matchmaker in San Francisco who creates an imaginary fiancé in order to satisfy her marriage-minded traditional parents offers a fresh variation on the timeless theme of a young woman's quest for true love.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Lina...
| Author | Roopa Farooki |
| ISBN | 0312360525 |
With this spellbinding first novel about the destructive lies three immigrant generations of a Pakistani/Bangladeshi family tell each other, Roopa Farooki adds a fresh new voice to the company of Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri and Arudhati Roy.
Henna Rub is a precocious teenager whose...
Ramchand, a tired shop assistant in Sevak Sari House in Amritsar, spends his days patiently showing yards of fabric to the women of "status families" and to the giggling girls who dream of dressing up in silk but can only afford cotton. When Ramchand is sent to show his wares to a wealthy family preparing...
| Author | Sonia Singh |
| ISBN | 0060590386 |
After seven years of slogging through film roles too embarrassing to mention, twenty-eight-year-old struggling L.A. actress Raveena Rai has finally been offered a lead! A potentially career-making turn in a major Hollywood epic, perhaps? A meaty part in a serious drama with Oscar® written all...
Indian Maidens Bust Loose
Nisha Desai is a young Indian woman who pines for romance in a country where love is in the same class as malaria, and where mates are selected using a calculator.
Normally deluged with ghastly suitors of her father's choosing, she suddenly finds herself on the short list for a bride-seeing tour...
| Author | Kavita Daswani |
| ISBN | 0452285526 |
Anju wants a husband. Equally important, her entire family wants Anju to have a husband. Her life in Bombay, where a marriage can be arranged in a matter of hours, is almost solely devoted to this quest, with her anxious mother hauling her from holy site to holy site in order to consult and entreat swamis...
| Author | Tarquin Hall |
| ISBN | 0771038259 |
Watch out Alexander McCall Smith! Here comes the first novel by the highly acclaimed writer Tarquin Hall in an entrancing new mystery series set in India.
The portly Vish Puri is India’s most accomplished detective, at least in his own estimation, and is also the hero of an irresistible new...
| Author | Padma Viswanathan |
| ISBN | 0307356329 |
In south India in 1896, ten-year old Sivakami is about to embark on a new life. Hanumarathnam, a village healer with some renown as an astrologer, has approached her parents with a marriage proposal. In keeping with custom, he provides his prospective in-laws with his horoscope. The problem is that...
| Author | Shobhan Bantwal |
| ISBN | 0758232039 |
"What happens when a woman who's realized her dreams wakes up to a shocking truth? Shobhan Bantwal's poignant new novel weaves a captivating tale of one woman's return to India: the place where she lost everything--and now has everything to gain. . .
It is a morning like any other in suburban...
| Author | Sarita Mandanna |
| ISBN | 0753827794 |
2.5 stars rounded up
This is quite a hefty tome with a lot going on. Some of the publicity describes it as A Suitable Boy meets The Thorn Birds meets Gone with the Wind. It spans the years1878 to 1936. It is set in the south Indian province of Coorg, in the Sahaydri Mountains. The author comes from this...
| Author | Thrity Umrigar |
| ISBN | 0312286236 |
At the wedding of a young man from a middle-class apartment building in Bombay, the men and women of this unique community gather together and look back on their youthful, idealistic selves and consider the changes the years have wrought. The lives of the Parsi men and women who grew up together in Wadi...
