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	Midnight's Children  •  Salman Rushdie LITERATURE •  2006 •  PAPER  • 533 PAGES • FAVORITE Salman Rushdie's greatest book is a madcap, comic, unrestrained novel that takes as its subject the birth of modern India. The narrator, born at the stroke of India's independence on August 15, 1947, is a proxy for the nation itself, and the history of his family is also the history of India. (IDA12, $14.95)
	The White Tiger, A Novel  •  Aravind Adiga LITERATURE •  2008 •  PAPER  • 288 PAGES Adiga explores the materialism and technology-induced mania of twenty-first century urban India through the tale of Balram Halwa, a village pauper-turned-entrepreneur. It's a transfixing story, both shocking and entertaining, of hard-fought success. Winner of the 2008 Booker Prize (IDA542, $14.00)
	The Inheritance of Loss  •  Kiran Desai LITERATURE •  2006 •  PAPER  • 336 PAGES • NEW Alternating between a once grand household in northern India and the life of the cook's son in New York, this novel by the marvelous and wise Desai skewers the aspirations and reality of both worlds. Happily, she immerses the reader in the particulars of place. Winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize. (IDA303, $14.00)
	The God of Small Things  •  Arundhati Roy LITERATURE •  2008 •  PAPER  • 336 PAGES A mystery, family saga and tale of innocence lost set in Kerala during the tumult of the 1960s. The novel opens in June, at the beginning of the monsoon season, when "The countryside turns an immodest green ... Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads." Winner of the Booker Prize. (IDA31, $15.00)
	Heat and Dust  •  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala LITERATURE •  1999 •  PAPER  • 192 PAGES Evocatively set in 1920s India, this Booker Prize-winning short novel centers around an Anglo-Indian romance, tackling with precision issues of class, colonialism and propriety. (IDA239, $14.95)
	Malgudi Days  •  R. K. Narayan  •  Jhumpa Lahiri LITERATURE •  2006 •  PAPER  • 272 PAGES • FAVORITE Wonderful tales about a fictional South Indian town by a beloved Indian writer. Malgudi is a composite of Narayan's two hometowns -- Mysore and Madras -- populated by quirky characters whose unique approaches to tradition and modernity are the stuff of great short stories. (IDA59, $15.00)
	Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher  •  R. K. Narayan LITERATURE •  2006 •  HARD COVER  • 648 PAGES An Everyman's Library edition. Swami and Friends introduces us to Narayan's beloved fictional town of Malgudi, where ten-year-old Swaminathan's excitement about his country's initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardor for cricket and all other things British. The Bachelor of Arts is a poignant coming-of-age novel about a young man flush with first love, but whose freedom to pursue it is hindered by the fixed ideas of his traditional Hindu family. In The Dark Room, Narayan's portrait of aggrieved domesticity, the docile and obedient Savitri, like many Malgudi women, is torn between submitting to her husband's humiliations and trying to escape them. The title character in The English Teacher, Narayan's most autobiographical novel, searches for meaning when the death of his young wife deprives him of his greatest source of happiness. (IDA337, $25.00)
	A Fine Balance  •  Rohinton Mistry LITERATURE •  1997 •  PAPER  • 624 PAGES • FAVORITE The secret to life, according to a recurring character in this sprawling tale, is "to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair." Set in 1975 in an unnamed Indian "city by the sea," which seems to bear a striking resemblance to Bombay, this tender novel follows the intermingled fortunes of a Parsi widow, a college student who is her boarder, and two Hindu tailors trying to make their way in the city. Each character is meticulously drawn, and the often harrowing background stories (including some murderous caste violence in the tailors' family) are interweaved through the main narrative, which finds the four thrown briefly, and eventually very happily, together in a tiny flat. All this is set against the background of Indira Gandhi's "emergency Raj," in which civil liberties were essentially suspended. It's all profoundly moving, a rare window into the cultural and religious maelstrom of India. One of the best things we've read on India, and a fine piece of literature. A Booker Prize finalist. (IDA92, $15.95)
	Family Matters  •  Rohinton Mistry LITERATURE •  2003 •  PAPER  • 444 PAGES An aging professor comes to live with his daughter, her husband and their two children in a cramped Bombay apartment in Mistry's moving, and often comic, tale of history, memory and familial bonds. (IDA214, $15.95)
	Sea of Poppies  •  Amitav Ghosh LITERATURE •  2008 •  HARD COVER  • 512 PAGES Ghosh conjures the tumult of the 19th-century Opium Wars and colonial India in this gripping saga, featuring an unforgettable cast of characters, Indian, Chinese and British. First in a planned trilogy, this is the tale of the Ibis and its crew, en route to Mauritius. (IDA529, $26.00)
	The Glass Palace  •  Amitav Ghosh LITERATURE •  2002 •  PAPER  • 474 PAGES In this panoramic novel, full of tales and anecdote, Ghosh follows the lives and fortunes of Rajkumar and his family over three eventful generations in Burma, India and Malaysia. The book opens with the British taking the Burmese royal family into custody in Mandalay in 1885. (IDA173, $14.95)

	A Suitable Boy  •  Vikram Seth   • LITERATURE  •  A modern classic set in Calcutta, Delhi and other northern India cities after Independence, bursting with history, character, and politics. In this outstanding epic novel, Seth displays his cultural sensitivity, historical insight, and poetic creativity. (IDA27, $21.95)
	Baumgartner's Bombay  •  Anita Desai   • LITERATURE  •  The tale of Hugo Baumgartner, a Jewish businessman who flees to India to escape persecution. (IDA245, $13.00)
	Fasting, Feasting  •  Anita Desai   • LITERATURE  •  A well-constructed and deeply disturbing story of a sister and brother in a middle-class Indian family. Dull Uma is constrained to live at home and totally controlled by her parents, whereas bright Arun is helped to achieve academically and goes abroad to America. An eye-opening view into cultural differences and the Indian experience at home and abroad. (IDA172, $13.95)
	Gods, Demons and Others  •  R. K. Narayan  •  R.K. Laxman   • LITERATURE  •  Hindu stories freely adapted by Narayan, one of India's foremost writers. They include tales both highly readable and revealing of Indian Hindu traditions, some drawn from the Ramayana and the Mahabarata. (IDA101, $21.00)
	In a Free State  •  V.S. Naipaul   • LITERATURE  •  The Booker Prize Winning collection. (IDA557, $13.95)
	Mr Sampath -- The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma  •  R. K. Narayan   • LITERATURE  •  An Everyman's Library edition of three novels written after India's independence -- including the comic tale, Narayan's funniest, of the printer of Malgudi, whose glamorous new job as screenwriter goes to his head. (IDA336, $25.00)
	Shalimar the Clown  •  Salman Rushdie   • LITERATURE  •  Rushdie's sprawling novel overflows with allusions, ideas, characters and commentary. As told through the life of Shalimar, it concerns the fate of Kashmir, Hindu and Muslim animosity, adultery and contemporary Los Angeles. (IDA270, $14.95)
	The Abduction of Sita  •  R. K. Narayan   • LITERATURE  •  Narayan's version of the Hindu epic of the struggle of Rama (with the help of the brave moneky Hanuman) to get the Princess Sita back from the evil lord Ravana. (IDA335, $8.95)
	The Death of Vishnu, A Novel  •  Manil Suri   • LITERATURE  •  A vibrant, richly drawn debut novel, set in a colorful apartment house in the author's native Bombay. (IDA197, $14.95)
	The Enchantress of Florence  •  Salman Rushdie   • LITERATURE  •  Rushdie conjures life in Renaissance Florence and the Mughal Empire with humor and vivid detail in this bawdy, improbable tale. (ITL948, $26.00)
	The Guide  •  R. K. Narayan   • LITERATURE  •  A comic look at the life of a rogue, set in Malgudi, a fictional town in southern India like many of Narayan's novels. Originally published in 1958. (IDA310, $14.00)
	The Moor's Last Sigh  •  Salman Rushdie   • LITERATURE  •  A sweeping family epic that tackles many of the most complex aspects about Indian culture. In his characteristically rich prose, Rushdie tells the history of India, set among the spice traders of Cochin. (IDA89, $14.95)
	The Shadow Lines  •  Amitav Ghosh   • LITERATURE  •  Set in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh's novel follows two families, one English, one Bengali, as their paths intertwine in tragic and comic ways. (IDA513, $14.00)
	The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature  •  Amit Chaudhuri   • LITERATURE  •  An introduction to Indian fiction and poetry since 1850, including works both in translation and written originally in English. The authors span a century and a half of Indian letters, from Tagore and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Rushdie and Anita Desai. (IDA218, $15.00)
	Twilight in Delhi  •  Ahmed Ali   • LITERATURE  •  This much-loved novel captures life in turn-of-the-century Delhi. (IDA62, $14.95)

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