Best South Asian Fiction
Top 10 Best South Asian Fiction
: The Namesake, The Inheritance of Loss, Unaccustomed Earth, The Glass Palace, The Space Between Us, Family Matters, Brick Lane, Secret Daughter, The Satanic Verses, Such a Long Journey
| Author | Jhumpa Lahiri |
| ISBN | 0618485228 |
Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were...
| Author | Kiran Desai |
| ISBN | 0802142818 |
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju,...
| Author | Jhumpa Lahiri |
| ISBN | 0676979343 |
Eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any Lahiri has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.
From the internationally best-selling,...
| Author | Amitav Ghosh |
| ISBN | 0375758771 |
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh 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...
This book ravaged my soul and kidnapped my heart. I don't believe I will ever be the same upon finishing this masterpiece of a novel. This book rocked me to my core; It changed every fiber of my being. The premise of this book is simple. However, what transpires over the course of this novel, is anything but....
Rohinton Mistry’s enthralling novel is at once a domestic drama and an intently observed portrait of present-day Bombay in all its vitality and corruption. At the age of seventy-nine, Nariman Vakeel, already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, breaks an ankle and finds himself wholly dependent...
| Author | Monica Ali |
| ISBN | 0743243315 |
A captivating read from a debut novelist, Brick Lane brings the immigrant milieu of East London to vibrant life. With great poignancy, Ali illuminates a foreign world; her well-developed characters pull readers along on a deeply psychological, almost spiritual journey. Through the eyes of two Bangladeshi...
| Author | Shilpi Somaya Gowda |
| ISBN | 0061922315 |
Somer's life is everything she imagined it would be — she's newly married and has started her career as a physician in San Francisco — until she makes the devastating discovery she never will be able to have children.
The same year in India, a poor mother makes the heartbreaking choice to...
| Author | Salman Rushdie |
| ISBN | 0312270828 |
Just before dawn one winter's morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky,...
| Author | Rohinton Mistry |
| ISBN | 0771061315 |
It is Bombay in 1971, the year India went to war over what was to become Bangladesh. A hard-working bank clerk, Gustad Noble is a devoted family man who gradually sees his modest life unravelling. His young daughter falls ill; his promising son defies his father’s ambitions for him. He is the one reasonable...
“In the summer of 1947, when the creation of the 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...
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
| Author | Salman Rushdie |
| ISBN | 0670886580 |
Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here
Discover Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie’s classic fantasy novel
Set in an exotic Eastern landscape peopled by magicians and fantastic talking animals, Salman Rushdie's classic children's novel Haroun and the Sea...
Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Amitav Ghosh's radiant second novel follows two families—one English, one Bengali—as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of World War II to the...
2 States: The Story of My Marriage
| Author | Chetan Bhagat |
| ISBN | 8129115301 |
Love marriages around the world are simple: Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. They get married. In India, there are a few more steps: Boy loves Girl. Girl loves Boy. Girl's family has to love boy. Boy's family has to love girl. Girl's Family has to love Boy's Family. Boy's family has to love girl's family....
| Author | Jhumpa Lahiri |
| ISBN | 0307265749 |
Epic in its canvas and intimate in its portrayal of lives undone and forged anew, The Lowland is a deeply felt novel of family ties that entangle and fray in ways unforeseen and unrevealed, of ties that ineluctably define who we are
From Subhash's earliest memories, at every point, his brother...
Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT
| Author | Chetan Bhagat |
| ISBN | 8129104598 |
Five Point Someone is a story about three friends in IIT who are unable to cope.
The book starts with a disclaimer, “This is not a book to teach you how to get into IIT or even how to live in college. In fact, it describes how screwed up things can get if you don’t think straight.”
Three...
| Author | Upamanyu Chatterjee |
| ISBN | 1590171799 |
Agastya Sen, known to friends by the English name August, is a child of the Indian elite. His friends go to Yale and Harvard. August himself has just landed a prize government job. The job takes him to Madna, “the hottest town in India,” deep in the sticks. There he finds himself surrounded by incompetents...
| Author | Amitav Ghosh |
| ISBN | 0719568986 |
In September 1838, a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. River of Smoke follows its storm-tossed characters to the crowded harbors of China. There, despite efforts...
| Author | R.K. Narayan |
| ISBN | 0143039652 |
Four gems, with new introductions, mark acclaimed Indian writer R. K. Narayan’s centennial
Introducing this collection of stories, R. K. Narayan describes how in India “the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story.” Composed of powerful, magical...
| Author | Anne Cherian |
| ISBN | 0393065235 |
Handsome anesthesiologist Neel prides himself on his decisiveness, both in and out of the operating room. So when he agrees to return to India to visit his ailing grandfather, he is sure he’ll be able to resist his family’s pleas that he marry a “good” Indian girl. With a girlfriend and a promising...
Saving Fish from Drowning
San Francisco art patron Bibi Chen has planned a journey of the senses along the famed Burma Road for eleven lucky friends. But after her mysterious death, Bibi watches aghast from her ghostly perch as the travelers veer off her itinerary and embark on a trail paved with cultural gaffes and tribal curses,...
| Author | Anita Amirrezvani |
| ISBN | 0316065765 |
In the fabled city of Isfahan, in seventeenth-century Persia, a young woman confronts a dismal fate: Her beloved father had died and left her without a dowry. Forced to work as a servant in the home of her uncle, a rich rug designer in the court of the Shah, the young woman blossoms as a brilliant designer...
India, 1857--the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.
Farrell's story...
| Author | R.K. Narayan |
| ISBN | 0099282283 |
As always with Narayan, the writing is a joy to read. The prose flows smoothly, the descriptions come to life and dialogue reads as true. I liked the story too (I won't spoil it by giving it away) but the metaphysical aspects were not believable and once I reached that part of the book, it became a bit heavy-going....
| Author | George Orwell |
| ISBN | 1421808307 |
Totally rewritten 19th May 2013.
Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, this book describes corruption and imperial bigotry. Although this was Orwell's first book and no doubt based in part on his experiences in his first job as a policeman in Burma, his talent is already...
| Author | Kamila Shamsie |
| ISBN | 0156029731 |
Raheen and her best friend, Karim, share an idyllic childhood in upper-class Karachi. Their parents were even once engaged to each others' partners until they rematched in what they call "the fiancée swap." But as adolescence distances the friends, Karim takes refuge in maps while Raheen searches...
| Author | Thrity Umrigar |
| ISBN | 0061938343 |
Thrity Umrigar, acclaimed author of The Space Between Us and The Weight of Heaven, returns with a breathtaking new novel—a skillfully wrought, emotionally resonant story of four women and the indelible friendship they share. Fans of Jennifer Haigh’s Faith, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of...
| Author | Ruth Prawer Jhabvala |
| ISBN | 1582430152 |
Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a...
| Author | Dalia Sofer |
| ISBN | 0061130400 |
In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappearance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known.
As Isaac navigates the tedium and...
| Author | Gita Mehta |
| ISBN | 0449905667 |
Jaya Singh is the intelligent, beautiful, and compassionate daughter of the Maharajah and Maharani of Balmer. Raised in the thousand-year-old tradition of purdah, a strict regime of seclusion, silence, and submission, Jaya is ill-prepared to assume the role of Regent Maharani of Sirpur upon the...
