Readers > Booklists > Adult & teen lists > East Indian Experience
East Indian Experience
All titles shelved in Fiction collection, except as noted: M=mystery, SS= short story collection, Y=young adult.
- Alexander, Meena
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(1997)Sandhya Rosenblum, an immigrant from India married to an American Jewish man, tries to make sense of her life in a time of turbulence.
- Ali, Samina
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(2004)Layla is torn between her identities of dutiful Muslim daughter and free, independent American woman. Set against the backdrop of the ancient walled city of Hyderabad, this title evokes the complexities of life behind the chador.
- Badami, Anita Rau
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(2002)Set in the exotic railway colonies of India, this bestselling Canadian novel tells a story of the ties of love and resentment that bind a mother and daughter.
- Bahal, Aniruddha
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(2003)Our hero, known as "MM," is a pleasure-seeking journalist working for an upstart Indian newsweekly. He is also an ex-army cadet with political connections who is able to secure exclusive and dangerous assignments in the armed forces with the promise that he'll write about his experiences. But "MM" has ulterior motives.
- Bajwa, Rupa
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(2004)Ramchand, a sari shop assistant, gets the chance to see a wider world when he is assigned to make saris for an upper class wedding. Inspired to improve himself, Ramchand attempts to learn English and starts a self-improvement reading plan. Bajwa paints an ascerbic picture of sari-shopping ladies in urban India.
- Banerjee, Anjali
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(2005)In this hilarious first novel, a young Bengali-American matchmaker creates an imaginary fiancé to satisfy her marriage-minded traditional parents.
- Banerjee, Anjali
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(2006)Lakshmi Sen was born with a magical ability to perceive the secret longings in others. Putting aside her own dreams to help run her widowed mother's struggling Seattle sari shop, Lakshmi knows exactly how to bring happiness to customers — from lonely immigrants to starry-eyed young brides. And to honor her father's dying wish, she has agreed to marry a respectable Indian doctor who will uphold her family's traditions.
- Basu, Kunal
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(2004)Set in 16th-century India, this novel is a story of ambition and love at the court of the Mughal emperor Asbar.
- Chandra, Vikram
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(2007)Dickensian story of an organized crime family in Mumbai, India
- Chatterjee, Upamanyu
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(2006)A satirical look at India.
- Chaudhuri, Amit
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(2002)In these wry stories, men, women, children and even gods try to maintain their dignity and make sense of their lives amid the jostling loneliness and cultural upheaval of independent India.
- Cleverly, Barbara
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(2002)MThe wives of officers in the Bengal Greys have been dying violently, one every year and always in March. The Governor of Bengal asks Scotland Yard detective Joe Sandilands to solve the crimes before another murder is committed.
- Daswani, Kavita
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(2004)After an arranged marriage in her native India, Priya moves with her husband to California, where they share a house with his parents. Priva takes a job and soon finds herself with a secret life that she must hide from her disapproving new family. All the while, she is growing into a marriage to a man whose loyalty is decidedly torn between his parents and his bride. Can this fragile new love survive the pull between tradition and ambition?
- Davidar, David
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(2002)This is a story of the Dorai family in South India during a time of tremendous political and social upheaval. Sophisticated and filled with historical and emotional insight, it is enlivened by touches of humor and deeply felt tragedy that draw on the author's own family history.
- Dawesar, Abha
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(2006)Prem Rustum, a celebrated aging Indian novelist, unexpectedly meets Maya, a vibrant aspiring writer, and surprises himself by following her to Paris. In the slow, sensuous summer that follows, Prem looks back on his muses, his art and his lost loves.
- Deb, Siddhartha
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(2005)Amrit Singh works for a Calcutta daily newspaper and is assigned to cover the murder of a woman by an insurgent group. The narrative sheds new light on India at moral, political and social crossroads. This novel traces the boundaries between illusion and reality, and the lives of people caught in the middle.
- Desai, Kiran
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(2006)The author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard takes readers to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency in Nepal challenges the old way of life.
- Deshpande, Shashi
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(1999)Set in present-day Karnataka, this novel, written by one of India's most distinguished women writers, explores the intricate relationships within an extended family.
- Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee
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(2004)Rakhi, a young artist, struggles to find solace in a dream journal written by her recently deceased mother. She and her Indian friends are attacked as terrorists after 9/11.
- Forbes, Leslie
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(1998)This thriller set in exotic India tells the intriguing story of a British journalist whose life is put in jeopardy after a brutal murder.
- Fracis, Sohrab Homi
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(2001)Poignant and daring, Ticket to Minto underlines the harsh realization that the immigrant never truly arrives but is in constant limbo between two worlds. As one character relates, "There's a part of me that's American and a part that's Indian. I'm clear about that and comfortable with it, except that sometimes people want me to be just the one or the other."
- Ganesan, Indira
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(1998)Sonil has come to her grandmother's house on an island off the coast of India to recuperate following an illness. There, as she yearns to find out why her mother abandoned her and where her American father might be, she begins to look to herself for the answers she needs.
- Ghatage, Shree
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(1997)Shaila has returned to Bombay for her father's birthday party. In these linked stories that follow her return, Ghatage renders an India that can only be revealed by first leaving, and then returning again.
- Ghosh, Amitav
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(2005)A contemporary story of adventure and romance, identity and history, this novel brings two outsiders deep into one of the most fascinating regions on earth — tiny islands known as the Sundarbans off the coast of India — where life is ruled by the unforgiving tides and the constant threat of attack by Bengal tigers.
- Gupta, Sunetra
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(2001)A missing man, presumed dead, leaves behind a pale, languishing wife and a mystery that takes twenty years to unfold.
- Hariharan, Githa
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(2003)With subtle humor, intensity of feeling and a rich evocation of place and circumstance, In Times of Siege delves into the dynamics of Indian family life, the power of the Indian religious right and the particular, surprising intimacy between a man and woman.
- Irani, Anosh
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(2005)This fable begins with the narrator waking up and discovering he is missing an arm. He has no idea how he lost it or how to find it. As he searches the chaotic, often surreal streets of Bombay, he meets an absurd and marvelous cast of characters who lead him to the master of the underworld.
- Jha, Radhika
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(2004)Drawing the reader deep into the uncharted zone between fantasy and reality and following the neglected souls of a vast country, If You Are Afraid of Heights is a breathtaking odyssey across the landscape of a changing urban India.
- Kakar, Sudhir
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(2000)The Kama Sutra is the most widely read treatise on sex ever written, while the man who chronicled all there was to experience between men and women remains a mystery. In The Ascetic of Desire, Sudhir Kakar tells the story of its author, Vatsayana.
- Kamani, Ginu
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(1995)Subverting her outrage to the tools of ambiguity and irony, author Kamani exposes the extreme individual displacement pervasive throughout all of the Indian castes.
- Karmali, Sikeena
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(2004)This debut novel is about a young woman's quest to reconcile her nomadic spirit with an inner longing for a home. Zahra Khan crosses four coutinents, untangling family secrets and the fateful lives of her grandmothers. East meets West, and tradition clashes with modernity in this family drama reaching back through time and generations, across Arabia, India, East Africa, England and Canada.
- Kirchner, Bharti
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(2003)Sunya, the daughter of parents who imigrated from India, is the head baker at Pastries Cafe where she transforms cakes and tarts into works of art. The success of her bakery is challenged when a chain bakery threatens to open down the street. Her life is further complicated by Roger, her "hip" Japanese boyfriend, and her mother's involvement with a man Sunya detests.
- Krishna Dharma
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(1999)One of the oldest and most cherished of all Indian classics, filled with deep spiritual wisdom, this is the story of five heroic brothers who were destined to rule a vast kingdom. Robbed of their kingdom and exiled by their own cousins, they experienced many astonishing adventures before finally engaging in a terrific fight for their kingdom.
- Lahiri, Jhumpa
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(2003)In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation and the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail that opens whole worlds of emotion.
- Le Hunte, Bem
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(2003)Follow five generations of an Indian family through 100 years of Indian history.
- Malladi, Amulya
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(2004)A young Indian immigrant to California rebuilds her life and struggles for acceptance by her traditional Indian family after a failed suicide attempt.
- Mehta, Gita
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(1993)With imaginative lushness and narrative elan, Mehta provides a novel that combines Indian storytelling with thoroughly modern perceptions into the nature of love.
- Meidav, Edie
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(2001)In her debut novel, Edie Meidav tells the tale of Henry Fyre Gould, a self-described anti-missionary who travels to Ceylon from the spiritualist salons of 1930s New York City. Driven by an arrogant faith in his ideals, Henry settles in the village of Rajottama, intent on establishing a model society built on the lost truths of Buddhism. Instead of a utopian village, he slowly finds a tinderbox of caste struggle, political rebellion, espionage and erotic intrigue.
- Miller, Almeda Glenn
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(2002)Mourning the recent loss of her Anglo-Indian father and suddenly aware of her own mortality, Claire, a thirty-something documentary filmmaker, travels from Canada to India to meet her last remaining relative, an elderly cousin named Charlotte. As Claire rummages through Charlotte's keepsakes, she discovers the untold story of her own grandmother, Alice Maud Spencer, the wife of Gandhi's jailer in the waning days of the Raj.
- Mishra, Pankaj
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(2000)The young Brahman Samar has come to the holy city of Benares to complete his education and take the civil service exam that will determine his future. But in this city redolent of timeworn customs, where pilgrims bathe in the sacred Ganges and breathe in smoke from burning ghats along the shore, Samar is offered entirely different perspectives on his country.
- Mistry, Rohinton
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(2002)This is the story of a 1990s Bombay family dealing with their elderly patriarch, who is suffering from Parkinson's disease.
- Mukherjee, Bharati
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(2002)Mukherjee, whose short story collection The Middleman and Other Stories won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award, presents a masterful meditation on marriage and family ties.
- Mukhopadhyay, Tito Rajarshi
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(2005)Beautiful, funny and touching stories written by a seventeen-year-old severely autistic youth.
- Nair, Anita
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(2006)This story of a love affair between the wife of an Indian businessman and a visiting American scholar blends myth, history and human emotion.
- Nair, Meera
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(2002)Nair depicts contemporary Indian life with fierce precision and a blend of humor, wit and pathos.
- Nigam, Sanjay
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(2002)Sonny Seth is a medical resident at a New York hospital serving a community of eccentric expatriates from India. Sonny's most demanding patient is a high-level Indian government official whose major organs have been transplanted at least once. Now deathly ill and hunted, he pulls Sonny into a soul-searching journey.
- Parekh, Sameer
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(2002)Twenty-three-year-old Rajiv Kothari is caught between a father who believed success and freedom could be found only in America and a grandfather who fought to guarantee such ideals in India, their homeland.
- Payne, Peggy
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(2001)Guests of the Saraswati Guest House in Varanasi, India, are shocked to encounter a surly white woman in a sari as their hostess. But when a series of Hindu-Muslim murders lead to a citywide curfew, the guests unwittingly become the captives of Madame Natraja and fall under the spell of an ancient kingdom.
- Prabhu, Manjiri
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(2004)MSonia Samarth decides to open a detective agency in Pune, India. She will use Hindu astrology as a crime-solving tool.
- Qurratul`ain, Haidar
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(1999)Qurratul`ain Hyder's River of Fire has long been acknowledged in the East as the most important novel of 20th-century Urdu fiction. First published as Aag ka Darya in 1959, the novel encompasses the fates of four recurring characters over two and a half millennia: Gautam, Champa, Kamal and Cyril, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Christian.
- Ramaya, Shona
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(2003)Set in a globalized community of merging cultures, Operation Monsoon offers an India of radical transitions, exploring junctures where history or myth cross paths with contemporary events.
- Roberts, Gregory David
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(2004)Based directly upon the experiences of its author, Shantaram is the story of a man who escapes from a maximum security prison in Australia to arrive in Bombay, where he works in a first aid station and smuggles drugs and guns.
- Roy, Arundhati
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(1997)Born of two eggs in the one womb of their beloved mother Ammu, Rahel and Esthappen have little to cling to but each other and the occasional joy that passes through their young lives like a cool breeze on a sweltering Indian day. When Ammu, divorced and disappointed, returns with the twins to her family home in southern India a tragedy begins to unfold.
- Sankaran, Lavanya
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(2005)Ageless traditions and modern-day mores collide in debut story collection set in contemporary India. It is filled with wry humor and the friction between generations in Bangalore, India's own Silicon Valley.
- Seth, Vikram
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(1993) )Seth offers a rich story of four extended families in postcolonial India in the 1950s.
- Shanghvi, Siddharth Dhanvant
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(2004)In the tradition of Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, Shanghvi tells a tender story of love and loss, sex, karma and colonialism set in 1920s India.
- Shankar, Subramanian
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(2005)A retired civil servant returns to a southern Indian village to care for his mother after his father's death. When his own son unexpectedly arrives to celebrate Diwali, the contrast between old and new India is revealed.
- Sharat Chandra, G.S.
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(1998)Author G.S. Sharat Chandra's stories introduce readers to the multifaceted challenges faced when (East) Indian Americans are divided between cultures.
- Sharma, Akhil
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(2000)Ram Karan, a corrupt official in the New Delhi school system, lives in one of the city's slums with his widowed daughter and his little granddaughter. Bumbling, sad, ironic Ram is also a man corroded by a terrible secret. With the assassination of the politician Rajiv Gandhi, Ram is plunged into a series of escalating and possibly deadly political betrayals.
- Sidhwa, Bapsi
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(1991)Eight-year-old Lenny, spirited daughter of an affluent Parsee family, narrates the story of the breaking of India as she witnesses Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Sikhs fight for their land and their lives during the dividing of the country into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947.
- Siegel, Lee
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(1999)The hero of this protean comedy is a professor and scholar of Indian studies who laments having never made love to an Indian woman. In his attempt to make this desire a reality, he is murdered. This novel exposes the complicities between the carnal and the intellectual, the erotic and the exotic and the false and the true.
- Singh, Jacquelin
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(1997)Through letters to her friend, Carol, Helen recounts her rough adjustment to Punjabi culture, where until 1952, bigamy is legal and divorce is rare. The letters provide an unprejudiced comparison between a ambitious intellectual with a penchant for married men and a devoted wife in a very un-American arrangement.
- Sinha, Indra
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(2004)This novel of passion and vengeance, fact and fiction is based on a real-life murder in 1950s Bombay.
- Slaughter, Carolyn
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(2004)Set against the backdrop of India in the 1920s, this novel is the tale of a powerful and erotic love affair that combines the themes of colonial exploitation, political and ethnic tensions, race and sexuality, and the many forms of partition, both secular and religious.
- Speed, John
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(2006)Historical saga of 17th century India
- Sundaresan, Indu
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(2002)Mehrunnisa, better known as Empress Nur Jahan, comes into the harem of the emperor, Jahangir, as his last and twentieth wife, the empress of the Mughal empire, the woman for whom the Taj Mahal was built.
- Sundaresan, Indu
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(2006)A story of forbidden love set against the backdrop of World War II and the struggle for Indian independence.
- Suri, Manil
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(2001)Suffused with Hindu mythology, this story becomes a metaphor for the social and religious divisions of contemporary India as Vishnu's accent of a staircase parallels the soul's progress through the various stages of existence.
- Swarup, Vikas
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(2006)Ram Mohammad Thomas may be in jail, but he is not a criminal. A penniless 18-year-old waiter from the slums of India, Ram appeared to be on the path to wealth when he correctly answered 12 questions on the television show "Who Wants to Win a Billion?" The show's producers bribe the police to arrest him for cheating, and as Ram's lawyer rescues him from prison, he also extracts Ram's amazing life story and a captivating portrait of 21st-century India.
- Syal, Meera
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(2000)This is the portrait of a group of Indian women living in London and the story of what happens when one of them makes a documentary starring the other two.
- Tejpal, Tarun J.
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(2006)Set against the brilliantly drawn backdrop of India at the turn of the millennium, The Alchemy of Desire tells the story of a young couple, penniless but gloriously in love. It also offers, in searing, lucid prose, a deeply sensual and moving account of the complex chemistry between sex, ambition and love.
- Tharoor, Shashi
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(1989)Shashi Tharoor has recast the 2,000-year-old epic The Mahabharata with fictional, but highly recognizable, events and characters from 20th-century Indian politics.
- Tyrewala, Altaf
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(2006)Multiple characters narrate interrelated pieces of the same story from different points of view in modern Mumbai (Bombay), India.
- Umrigar, Thrity N.
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(2006)This novel captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India, as witnessed through the lives of an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife and her stoic, illiterate domestic worker.
- Vakil, Ardashir
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(1997)With the collapse of his parents' marriage and his father's sudden death, the ten-year-old son of a successful shipping broker finds himself caught between the innocence of youth and the responsibilities of adulthood.
- Vaswani, Neela
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(2004)Vaswani tells stories that subvert conventional narratives by employing Indian lore, Gaelic fable and historical legend.
- Vijayaraghavan, Vineeta
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(2001)Fifteen-year-old Maya is disgruntled when her mother impels her to visit India for the summer to reacquaint herself with her extended Indian family. Over the course of three months, Maya learns why a rift has always existed between her mother and herself.
