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Great Indian Writers   |   READING AND TRAVEL GUIDE

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Highly Recommended
The Artist of Disappearance  •  Anita Desai
LITERATURE •  2011 •  HARD COVER  • 176 PAGES
Award-winning author Desai reminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life's expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas set in India. (IDA635, $23.00)		   The Artist of Disappearance
Last Man in Tower  •  Aravind Adiga
LITERATURE •  2011 •  HARD COVER  • 381 PAGES
The congenial neighbors -- Hindu, Christian, Muslim -- of an old-fashioned apartment bulding in middle-class Mumbai turn out to be anything but when a high-stakes developer tries to buy them out in this murder mystery and masterful portrait of a a city in flux by the 2008 Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger. (IDA643, $26.95)		   Last Man in Tower
India, A Traveler's Literary Companion  •  Chandrahas Choudhury
ANTHOLOGY •  2010 •  PAPER  • 256 PAGES
Dozens of distinct cultures and regions are brought together in this vibrant collection of 14 short stories featuring India's finest contemporary writers -- a wonderful introduction to the history, complexity and allure of the country. (IDA598, $14.95)		   India, A Traveler's Literary Companion
Swimming Lessons  •  Rohinton Mistry
LITERATURE •  1997 •  PAPER  • 256 PAGES
Firozsha Baag is an apartment building in Bombay. Its ceilings need plastering and some of the toilets leak appallingly, but its residents are far from desperate, though sometimes contentious and unforgiving. In these witty, poignant stories, Mistry charts the intersecting lives of Firozsha Baag, yielding a delightful collective portrait of a middle-class Indian community poised between the old ways and the new. (IDA626, $15.00)		   Swimming Lessons
The Romantics  •  Pankaj Mishra
LITERATURE •  2001 •  PAPER  • 272 PAGES
Though at heart a simple tale of East meets West; the sentimental education of a young Indian University student living among foreigners adrift in 1980's Varanasi, this first novel rises above the hackneyed theme of cultural collision. Mishra's beautifully nuance writing evokes the inner states of his characters, engaging the reader with subtlety and capturing the vibrancy of the Indian landscapes. (IDA143, $16.00)		   The Romantics
The Moor's Last Sigh  •  Salman Rushdie
LITERATURE •  1997 •  PAPER  • 435 PAGES
A sweeping family epic that tackles the complex history of India and its diverse cultures. Related by the "Moor" Moraes Zogoiby, it is a tale that spans many decades as well as diverse classes, races, religions and moral positions. In his characteristically rich prose, Rushdie tells the history of India, with the precision of reality and the force of myth. Much of the book is set among the spice traders of Cochin. (IDA89, $16.00)		   The Moor's Last Sigh
The Guide  •  R. K. Narayan
LITERATURE •  2006 •  PAPER  • 240 PAGES
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, $15.00)		   The Guide
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, $15.00)		   The Glass Palace



Also Recommended

The Beautiful and the Damned, A Portrait of the New India  •  Siddhartha Deb   • CULTURAL PORTRAIT  •  Six years after leaving his home in northeastern India for a fellowship at Columbia, Deb returned home to work as an undercover reporter for The Guardian. The novelist's first nonfiction book mixes personal narrative with incisive portraits of a wide range of contemporary Indian personalities. (IDA639, $26.00)
 		  
A Fine Balance  •  Rohinton Mistry   • LITERATURE • FAVORITE  •  Set in Indira Gandhi's "Emergency Raj" of 1975 in an unnamed Indian "city by the sea," which bears a striking resemblance to Bombay, this tender novel follows the intermingled fortunes of a Parsi widow, her boarder and two tailors. (IDA92, $17.00)
 		  
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, $21.99)
 		  
Baumgartner's Bombay  •  Anita Desai   • LITERATURE  •  The tale of Hugo Baumgartner, a Jewish businessman who flees to India to escape persecution. (IDA245, $13.95)
 		  
Family Matters  •  Rohinton Mistry   • LITERATURE  •  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. (IDA214, $15.95)
 		  
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, $23.00)
 		  
Heat and Dust  •  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala   • LITERATURE  •  This short novel, centered around an Anglo-Indian romance, tackles with precision issues of class, colonialism and propriety in 1920s India. (IDA239, $15.95)
 		  
In a Free State  •  V.S. Naipaul   • LITERATURE  •  The Booker Prize Winning collection. (IDA557, $15.00)
 		  
Malgudi Days  •  R. K. Narayan   • LITERATURE • FAVORITE  •  Wonderful tales from one of India's foremost writers about a fictional South Indian town, populated by quirky characters whose unique approaches to tradition and modernity are the stuff of great short stories. (IDA59, $15.00)
 		  
Midnight's Children  •  Salman Rushdie   • LITERATURE • FAVORITE  •  Crowned Best of the Booker in 2008, Rushdie's greatest novel is a madcap, comic take on the birth of modern India in all its splendid and unexpected manifestations. (IDA12, $16.00)
 		  
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)
 		  
River of Smoke  •  Amitav Ghosh   • LITERATURE  •  A clipper ship carrying opium from India to Canton, a nursery ship on the trail of rare Chinese plants, and the good ship Ibis, full of indentured servants, converge in Canton's Fanqui-Town, or Foreign Enclave in this second book in Ghosh's epic trilogy. (IDA638, $28.00)
 		  
Sea of Poppies  •  Amitav Ghosh   • LITERATURE  •  Amativ Ghosh conjures the tumult of the 19th-century Opium Wars and colonial India in this expansive tale, featuring a motley cast of British, Chinese and Indian characters. (IDA529, $16.00)
 		  
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, $16.00)
 		  
Shame  •  Salman Rushdie   • LITERATURE  •  This is Rushdie's fictionalized account of the first 40 years of Pakistan and the reign of the Bhutto clan. Though the author takes his usual liberties with magic, coincidence, and parallel lives, the book is a historical novel at its core. (PKN12, $15.00)
 		  
Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher  •  R. K. Narayan   • LITERATURE  •  Four early novels in an omnibus Everyman's edition. Narayan introduces his beloved Malgudi in Swami and Friends -- in which Swaminathan's excitement about his country's initial stirrings for independence competes with his ardor for cricket and all other things British. (IDA337, $27.00)
 		  
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, $15.00)
 		  
The God of Small Things  •  Arundhati Roy   • LITERATURE  •  This luminous, Booker-prize winning novel is part mystery, part family saga -- a tale of lost innocence set in Kerala during the tumult of the 1960s. (IDA31, $16.00)
 		  
The Inheritance of Loss  •  Kiran Desai   • LITERATURE  •  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. (IDA303, $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, $21.00)
 		  
The White Tiger, A Novel  •  Aravind Adiga   • LITERATURE  •  Mordant, funny, angry, horrifying, this Booker Prize-winning tale of a village pauper turned success (and murderer) skewers the ambition, inequity and corruption of 21st-century India. (IDA542, $15.00)
 		  
Train to Pakistan, A Novel  •  Khushwant Singh   • LITERATURE  •  This novel, set during the violence following the 1947 creation of Pakistan by the British, follows the inhabitants of a fictional Punjab village. (IDA264, $14.95)
 		  
Twilight in Delhi  •  Ahmed Ali   • LITERATURE  •  Set at the turn-of-the-century, this much-loved novel, written in English, captures life in Delhi through the tale of the Muslim merchant Mir Nihal and his family. It's an enlightening portrait of Mughal Delhi, its culture and traditions, family ceremonies and traditions, kite battles and pigeon flying. (IDA62, $14.95)
 		  
 
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