100 Best Books and Novels by Indian Authors

An astounding exploration of intense longings, Shubhangi Swarup’s novel begins in the depths of the Andaman Sea, and follows geological and emotional faultlines through the Irrawaddy delta and the tourist-trap of Thamel, to end amidst the highest glaciers and passes of the Karakorams. The story sweeps through worlds and times that are inhabited by: a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who talks to them; Lord Goodenough who travels around the furthest reaches of the Raj, giving names to nameless places; a geologist working towards ending futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a superstitious dictator and a mother struggling to get her revolutionary son released; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who turns first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents.

When her estranged father passes away, Fiza, fresh out of college, discovers that he has left her a tidy sum in the hope that she will open a bookshop… Overnight, Fiza’s placid life is thrown into a whirl of decor decisions and book-buying sprees, unconventional staff and colourful patrons, small pleasures and little heartbreaks, as the store — Paper Moon — begins to take shape in a charming, old Bandra mansion. To top it all, she is being wooed by Iqbal, a mysterious customer who frequents the shop, and Dhruv, her ex-boyfriend, her feelings for whom are still confused.

The Shergill sisters never needed each other–until they did. Rajni, Jezmeen, and Shirina Shergill have never been close but when their mother dies, she has only one request: that they take a pilgrimage across India to carry out her final rites. While an extended family holiday is the last thing they want, each sister has her own reasons to run away from her life. Rajni is the archetypal know-it-all eldest but her son dropped a bombshell before she left and, for the first time, she doesn’t know what the future holds. Middle sister Jezmeen, always a loudmouth, has translated her need for attention into life as a struggling actress. But her career is on the skids after an incident went viral and now she’s desperate to find her voice again. Shirina, the golden child, has confounded expectations by having an arranged marriage and moving to the other side of the world. But her perfect life isn’t what it seems and time is running out to make the right choice. As the miles rack up on their jaunt across India, the secrets of the past and present are sure to spill out.

Social media manager and popular blogger Aisha is flirty and flamboyant … even as she battles personal demons that tell her she must stop eating if she wants to stay pretty.

Ruhi couldn’t be more different from her friend Aisha. Working at Literacy Publishing, she feels grossly underappreciated by the editor-in-chief, who happens to be her mother. What keeps her going are her own ambitions – and her handsome author Tejas.

Bestselling novelist Tejas has a bad case of writer’s block. He leans on Ruhi for emotional support before getting enamored by Aisha as he struggles to live up to everyone’s expectations, including his own.

Can too much love be a dangerous thing? Bhaunri is married, as is the custom in her tribe of nomadic blacksmiths when she is still a child. When she is finally sent away to her husband’s home as a young woman, she finds herself drawn deeply and powerfully towards the gruff and handsome Bheema. Bheema, however, is far from the ideal husband, and when he strays one time too many, Bhaunri’s love for him begins to fester and grow into something dark and fearsome.

Mehrunnisa – the Sun of Women – one of India’s most legendary and controversial empresses … a woman who overcame insurmountable obstacles through sheer brilliance and determination … whose love shaped the course of the Mughal Empire. She is the twentieth wife. The daughter of refugees from Persia, growing up on the fringes of Emperor Akbar’s opulent palace grounds, Mehrunnisa first encounters Prince Salim on his wedding day. Eight years old at the time, she decides that she too will one day become Salim’s wife – unaware of the great price she and her family will pay for this dream.

From the bestselling author of The Zoya Factor and Battle for Bittora…

Spot-on funny and toe-curlingly sexy, Those Pricey Thakur Girls is rom-com specialist Anuja Chauhan writing at her sparkling best.

The USSR-backed India-Mukti Bahini alliance is on the brink of war against the America-aided Pakistani forces. As the Cold War threatens to turn red hot, handsome, laughing Ishaan Faujdaar, a farm boy from Chakkahera, Haryana, is elated to be in the IAF, flying the Gnat, a tiny fighter plane nicknamed ‘Sabre Slayer’ for the devastation it has wreaked in the ranks of Pakistan’s F-86 Sabre Squadrons. Flanked by his buddies Raks, a MiG-21 Fighter, Maddy, a transport pilot who flies a Caribou, and fellow Gnatties Jana, Gana, and Mana, Shaanu has nothing on his mind but glory and adventure – until he encounters Tehmina Dadyseth, famed bathing beauty and sister of a dead fauji, who makes him question the very concept of nationalism and whose eyes fill with disillusioned scorn whenever people wax eloquent about patriotism and war…Pulsating with love, laughter, and courage, Baaz is Anuja Chauhan’s tribute to our men in uniform.

Niki’s determination to complete her dead father’s unfinished book, his life’s work, takes her from India to New York City where her pursuit of a mysterious immigrant woman turns into an obsession that begins to imperil her daughter, her marriage, and, eventually, Niki herself. When a blizzard blankets NYC, Niki finds herself on a path where the present and past collide violently. Propulsive and poetic, this elegant literary thriller melds the fervour of Punjab with the frenzy of New York. Spanning the cataclysms of Partition and 9/11, via the brutality of Emergency and the pogrom of 1984, the novel explores the impossible choices women are forced to make in the face of violence, the ties that connect them across ages, and the secrets they store.

A sensitive portrayal of the hopes and fears, triumphs and defeats experienced by the women of the Tagore household. in a sprawling novel that spans a unique phase in the history of Bengal and India, Aruna Chakravarti provides a fascinating account of how the Tagore women influenced and were in turn influenced by their illustrious male counterparts, the times they lived in and the family they belonged to. Jorasanko mirrors the hopes and fears, triumphs and defeats that the women of the Tagore household experienced in their intricate interpersonal relationships, as well as the adjustments they were continually called upon to make as daughters and daughters-in-law of one of the most eminent families of the land.

The much-awaited novel from the author of the bestselling Taj trilogy! Told in her inimitable trademark style, Indu Sundaresan’s The Mountain of Light is a wondrous and historically rich tale, as clear and as dazzling as a diamond itself.

When Mona Mathur of Dehradun had married her college sweetheart Ramit Deol of Amritsar, there were two things she wasn’t prepared for:1. The size of the Deol family – it put any Sooraj Barjatiya movie to shame2. The fertility of the Deol family – they reproduce faster than any other species are known to mankind for four years now, Mona and Ramit have done the unthinkable and remained childless. Of course, that also means that they’ve battled that one question day in and day out: ‘Koi Good News?’ It doesn’t matter that they have been happy to be child-free – they are married; they are expected to make babies. After all, there are grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts, and even colony aunties in waiting.

Village landlords force peasants to break their backs in the paddy fields or suffer beatings as punishment. So it is little wonder that the communist party begins to gain traction, a small spark of defiance spreading from villager to villager. As communities across the region begin to take a stand against the landlords, the landlords vow to break them: party organizers suffer grisly deaths and the flow of marketplace food dries up. But intimidation only serves to make the villagers’ resistance burn more fiercely. Finally, the landlords descend on one village to set an example to the others.

The nation sinks deep into mourning as news of former Prime Minister Rani Shah’s assassination arrives. Intelligence agencies, opposition leaders, the army top brass, her closest relatives – all seem to be shifting in their chairs even as special investigative teams gear up to file a report. Conspiracy theories abound for there were many who stood to gain if she pulled out of the imminent elections. The needle of suspicion points most immediately to Madam Shah’s close confidante Nazneen Khan, who was seen sitting right beside her in the convoy and, oddly, escaped the bomb blast unscathed. Sabyn Javeri’s tale of intense friendship between two ambitious women unfolds in a country steeped in fanaticism and patriarchy. Set against a backdrop of intrigue and political machinations, this is a novel about love, loyalty, obsession, and deception.

A journey into the dark heart of the desert. A young District Collector is posted to one of the furthest outposts of rural Rajasthan and finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the lives and troubles of the common people there. Then one day, with the help of a mysterious musician, the Sarangiya, he has an encounter with beauty in its purest, most absolute form – an encounter that precipitates a dangerous descent. The pages from the journal he keeps are combined with the narratives of various people around him to create a compelling account of his slide away from reality.

The time is the early 16th century. The Rajput kingdom of Mewar is at the height of its power. It is locked in a war with the Sultanates of Delhi, Gujarat, and Malwa. But there is another deadly battle being waged within Mewar itself. who will inherit the throne after the death of the Maharana? The course of history, not just of Mewar but of the whole of India, is about to be changed forever

Marked by the lyrical beauty and spiritual insight, a deep understanding of human suffering that coexists with rapturous abandon, the poems of Jalaluddin Rumi continue to be relevant almost eight centuries after they were composed, with contemporary audiences finding new meanings in them. Rumi’s poems bring together the divine and the human, the mystical and the corporeal to create a vivid kaleidoscope of poetic images.

There are places where the past lingers, making shapes in the moonlight and blowing in the curtains even as the air goes suddenly still. K. Hari Kumar, the bestselling author of spine-chilling horror fiction, brings you the terrifying tales of some of India’s most haunted places – including Bhangarh Fort, Malabar Hill’s Tower of Silence, and Jammu and Kashmir’s notorious Khooni Nala. Whether you read them at night or in daylight, these stories will remain with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

Raghav Marathe, cynical millennial turned reluctant policy analyst, arrives in Delhi with his boss, Prabhu Srikar of the RJM party, and a first-time MP with a tendency to throw up. As they navigate their way around Parliament, handling backroom deals, nepotistic party heads, and laws that seem to be tailor-made to benefit the ruling party, they learn that politics and idealism don’t always go together. While Srikar tries to adapt to his new avatar and lie low, Raghav uses his Twitter alter ego, @Arnavinator, to vent his frustration and spread chaos.But when a new bill that threatens freedom of expression is bulldozed through with impunity, Srikar and Raghav must make a choice – to compromise on their values or to stand up for what is right. But at what cost? And can they and their unlikely allies – a jaded lawyer, an ambitious journalist and a rising YouTube star – really make a difference?

An Indian man writes to a Japanese woman. She writes back. The pen-friends fall in love and exchange their vows over letters, then live as man and wife without ever setting eyes on each other – their intimacy of words tested finally by life’s miraculous upheavals.The twelve stories in this collection are about the unexpected. An American professor visits India with the purpose of committing suicide, and goes on a desert journey with the daughter of a snake-charmer. A honeymooning Indian couple is caught up in the Tiananmen Square unrest. A Russian prostitute discovers her roots in the company of Calcutta revolutionaries. A holocaust victim stands tall among strangers in a landscape of hate. These are chronicles of memory and dreams born at the crossroads of civilizations. They parade a cast of angels and demons rubbing shoulders with those whose lives are never quite as ordinary as they seem.

Narasimha, once a brave soldier, has left the war and lies low as a physician in a village. But a familiar face from his past seeks his help to stop the tyranny of the blind usurper Andhaka. If Narasimha refuses, the world might just end. What will he do? And why did he leave the war in the first place? Prahlad, the interim king of Kashyapuri, is torn between the ideals of his unrighteous father and his love for Lord Vishnu. Whom will he choose? Hiranyakashyap, the ruler of the Asura Empire, wants to avenge the death of his wife. To do that, he must go through the Trials and get the ultimate weapon – the Brahmastra. But the Trials have sent so many others to their death. Can Hiranyakashyap survive?

In 1498, when Vasco da Gama set foot in Kerala looking for Christians and spices, he unleashed a wave of political fury that would topple local powers like a house of cards. The cosmopolitan fabric of a vibrant trading society – with its Jewish and Arab merchants, Chinese pirate heroes and masterful Hindu Zamorins – was ripped apart, heralding an age of violence and bloodshed. One prince, however, emerged triumphant from this descent into chaos. Shrewdly marrying Western arms to Eastern strategy, Martanda Varma consecrated the dominion of Travancore, destined to become one of the most dutiful pillars of the British Raj. What followed was two centuries of internecine conflict in one of India’s premier princely states, culminating in a dynastic feud between two sisters battling to steer the fortunes of their house on the eve of Independence.

When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition. Known as the twice-born – first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation – the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.

Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine. A group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by this discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists might record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way. Wondering if, unlike these hapless parrots, he has any wisdom to leave to the world, one-hundred-year-old Ulrich embarks on an epic armchair journey through the twists and turns of his country’s turbulent century – and through his own century of lost love and failed chemistry – and finds his way to an astonishing epiphany of redemption and enlightenment.

In this anthology, which comprises some of Khushwant Singh’s best writing, you can look forward to some talk of sex, a little of scotch and much scholarship. The collection attempts to mirror the author’s concerns and passions-his love of nature, his anguish over the situation in Punjab, his interest in religions of the world, and his scholarly research on the one into which he was born, Sikhism.

A boy who can predict the exact date a person will die… An elderly woman who knows that death is close, but learns how to cheat it… A child with a dangerous friend who happens to be invisible… A ghost who can’t stop reliving his suicide over and over again…People you’ll wish you never have to meet, and stories you’ll never forget.

Who tells the greatest story God or Manto? Dozakhnama: Conversations in Hell is an extraordinary novel, a biography of Manto and Ghalib and a history of Indian culture rolled into one. Exhumed from dust, Manto’s unpublished novel surfaces in Lucknow. Is it real or is it a fake? In this dastan, Manto and Ghalib converse, entwining their lives in shared dreams. The result is an intellectual journey that takes us into the people and events that shape us as a culture. As one writer describes it, I discovered Rabisankar Bal like a torch in the darkness of the history of this subcontinent. This is the real story of two centuries of our own country.

 Young Shivaji reaches Pune, a dying fort city, with his mother Jijabai and lights the first lamp within its ruins. While his father Shahaji Bhosle is away on deputation by the Adil Shah sultanate after having failed in a revolt against it, Shivaji learns how an empire is built from the ground up. Thus begins the life of the Great Maratha. What awaits Shivaji is nothing short of the vast scroll of history, and it takes him from Surat to Thanjavur and all the way to Aurangzeb’s durbar in Agra. He dreams of freeing his land from the clutches of Mughal rule, and though he suffers many defeats and personal losses along the way he never gives up his vision of Hindavi Swaraj. Amidst political intrigue and a chain of skirmishes, Shivaji becomes a leader, a warrior and a tactician par excellence, driven by immense pride and love for his motherland.

Fifteen-year-old Amrit disappears from her house in the middle of the night and returns a different person. Over the next two decades, her actions affect three generations of her Sikh family in Singapore. When Narain, her brother, leaves his new life in America to take care of her, he must find his place again in a country and a community that will not accept him for who he is. Gurdev, the eldest, raises his three daughters with fear and caution over what they might become. And Harbeer, whose wife has left him, is the unyielding patriarch who must reconcile his pride and learn to cope with his own demons.

Ten-year-old Pin knows she must not become like her mother Jini but doesn’t know why. She tries to figure out her mother’s moods through her cooking, even as she fights other battles-being a bursary student in an elite Christian school, facing hateful racial taunts from Bus Uncle and classmates like Abigail Goh.

When her meddlesome Nani ji Kulwant moves in, installing portraits of Sikh gurus whose features seem the change according to the atmosphere in the house, she brings with her a new set of rules. And old secrets begin to tumble out.

 Set in Mumbai, Shashi Deshpande’s novel tells the story of an unlikely love between two unusual people. Tender and tempestuous by turns, it draws you into the conflicts, languid pleasures and sharp sorrows of falling in love with a stranger who can never entirely be yours.

An extremely funny novel about two larger-than-life heroes and their bawdy, Rabelaisian adventures in post-colonial urban India. Ravan and Eddie remain one of the finest books written with Mumbai as a backdrop. It’s uproariously funny, outrageously irreverent … [and] reveals the city as a character, an actor, a living being.

Ravan and Eddie are back! They’ve been mortal enemies since birth because of a bizarre family feud. But now Ravan and Eddie’s lives converge as they share an obsession: having grown up in Bombay, the city of dancing movie stars and glitzy glamour, both dream of strutting down the road to superstardom. Can Ravan (a lowly taxi driver) and Eddie (a bouncer-cum-bartender at a speakeasy) rise from their dusty CWD chawls to the glittering heights of international fame?

Rollicking, bittersweet and sharply observed, Home Boy is at once an immigrant’s tale, a mystery, a story of love and loss as well as a unique meditation on Americana and notions of collective identity. It announces the debut of an original, electrifying voice in contemporary fiction.

Antara has never understood her mother Tara’s decisions – walking out on her marriage to follow a guru, living on the streets like a beggar, shacking up with an unknown artist, rebelling against society’s expectations … But when Tara starts losing her memory, Antara searches for a way to make peace with their shared past, a past that haunts them both.

As she relives her childhood in Pune in the eighties, the time she spent at a Catholic boarding school in the hills of Maharashtra, and her years as a young artist in Bombay, Antara comes up against her own fears and neuroses, realizing she might not be so different from Tara after all.

With uncommon acuity, Amitabha Bagchi writes of a world where favours are currency, where access to power sometimes feels like a prerequisite for survival, where power can be both total and ephemeral. The Householder is a view from within this world, an examination of the moral condition of our times.

Lyrical, spare, and charmingly self-deprecatory Amitabha Bagchi’s debut novel is a deeply funny account of growing up intelligent, sensitive, ambitious, and confused.

Almost from the moment, Maya steps into St Paul’s College, she is afraid. Everywhere she goes, she encounters questions and secrets. Not to mention the Shadows – a bunch of drop-dead gorgeous students who she realizes will do anything to keep their youth and beauty. Even kill. Maya wants no part in this sinister adventure. She would much rather be shopping for shoes, munching brownies and shedding her geeky image. But the teenager soon finds that she doesn’t have a choice. Only Maya can see the Shadows for what they really are. Only she can unravel the trail of clues laid long ago by a dead priest. This is why both the forces of good and evil need her so badly. Unsure about whom she can trust and believe, Maya launches into a clue hunt across Mumbai – and in the process, learns about love, friendship and growing up.

Twenty-five-year-old Jinni lives in Mumbai, works in a hip animation studio and is perfectly happy with her carefree life. Until her bossy grandmother shows up and announces that it is Jinni’s ‘duty’ to drop everything and come and contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections from their sleepy hometown, Bittora. Jinni swears she won’t but she soon ends up swathed in cotton saris and frumpy blouses, battling prickly heat, corruption and accusations of nymphomania as candidate Sarojini Pande, a daughter of the illustrious Pande dynasty of Pavit Pradesh. And if life isn’t fun enough already, her main opposition turns out to be Bittora ex-royal, Zain Altaf Khan – an irritatingly idealistic though undeniably lustworthy individual with whom Jinni shares a complicated history.

Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club Pick! Balli Kaur Jaswal’s sexy, lively book is a thought-provoking East-meets-West story about community, friendship, and women’s lives at all ages—a spicy and alluring mix of Together Tea and Calendar Girls.

The year is 1659. Idris, a Somalian trader, is in Kerala to attend the Mamangam festivities. By a strange twist of fate, he meets his nine-year-old son whose existence he had been unaware of. In an attempt to keep his son close to him, Idris embarks with him on a voyage that ends in the diamond mines of Golconda. Packed with passion, adventure, and fascinating aspects of life in the seventeenth century in southern India, Idris is a page-turner that will intrigue and excite readers everywhere.

Valmiki’s Ramayana is the story of Rama’s exile and returns to Ayodhya, of a triumphant king who will always do right by his subjects. In Volga’s retelling, it is Sita who, after being abandoned by Purushottam Rama, embarks on an arduous journey towards self-realization. Along the way, she meets extraordinary women who have broken free from all that held them back: husbands, sons, and their notions of desire, beauty, and chastity. The minor women characters of the epic as we know it — Surpanakha, Renuka, Urmila, and Ahalya — steer Sita towards an unexpected resolution. Meanwhile, Rama too must reconsider and weigh his roles as the king of Ayodhya and as a man deeply in love with his wife.

A couple exchange unprecedented confessions during nightly blackouts in their Boston apartment as they struggle to cope with a heartbreaking loss; a student arrives in new lodgings in a mystifying new land and, while he awaits the arrival of his arranged marriage wife from Bengal, he finds his first bearings with the aid of the curious evening rituals that his centenarian landlady orchestrates; a schoolboy looks on while his childminder finds that the smallest dislocation can unbalance her new American life all too easily and send her spiraling into nostalgia for her homeland…

The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother’s house for as long as he could remember, beheld but never fully noticed. They had all fought in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India. One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front line. Manek, dashing and confident, was a pilot with India’s fledgling air force; gentle Ganny became an army doctor in the arid North-West Frontier. Bobby’s pursuit would carry him as far as the deserts of Iraq and the green hell of the Burma battlefront.

In this inspiring, empowering book, Shetty draws on his time as a monk in the Vedic tradition to show us how we can clear the roadblocks to our potential and power. Drawing on ancient wisdom and his own rich experiences in the ashram, “Think Like a Monk” reveals how to overcome negative thoughts and habits, and access the calm and purpose that lie within all of us.

The lessons monks learn are profound but often abstract. Shetty transforms them into advice and exercises we can all apply to reduce stress, improve focus, improve relationships, identify our hidden abilities, increase self-discipline and give the gifts we find in ourselves to the world. Shetty proves that everyone can – and should – think like a monk.