By Chetan Bhagat
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
“Love marriage 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. Girl and Boy still love each other. They get married (From the Publisher).”
By John Shors
This "passionate, lush, and dramatic" novel reveals the story behind the building of the Taj Mahal and the destruction of a royal family.
By Thrity Umrigar
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
During the wedding of one of their neighbors, the longtime residents of a middle-class apartment building in Bombay look back on their lives.
By Avni Doshi
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian
Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, a literary debut novel set in India is about mothers and daughters, obsession and betrayal.
By Amita Trasi
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions, Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
Returning to her homeland in India, Tara searches for her childhood friend, Mukta, who was kidnapped from her home eleven years ago, and delves into the brutal underground world of human trafficking.
By Christopher Nicholson
Appointed the guardian of a pair of ailing elephants who have been brought to eighteenth-century England from India, sensitive twelve-year-old Tom nurses the duo back to health.
By Rohinton Mistry
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
“Mistry presents a magnetic tale of family obligations that comes as close to perfect as a novel can get. The setting is the ever-hectic city of Bombay during a 1990s wave of violent religious extremism, and the focus is on an extended Parsi family suffering the long-term consequences of a Juliet and Romeo-like tragedy (From the Publisher).”
By Rohinton Mistry
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
A portrait of India featuring four characters. Two are tailors who are forcibly sterilized, one is a student who emigrates, and the fourth is a widowed seamstress who decides to hang on. A tale of cruelty, political thuggery and despair by an Indian from Toronto, author of Such a Long Journey..
By Amitav Ghosh
Unable to forget the girl he befriended during the British invasion of 1885 when soldiers forced the royal family of Burma into exile, Rajkumar is lifted on the tides of political and social chaos to create an empire in the Burmese teak forests.
By Alka Joshi
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Adrienne Rein, Library Clerk, Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions, Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian
A talented henna artist for wealthy confidantes finds her efforts to control her own destiny in 1950s Jaipur threatened by the abusive husband she fled as a teenage girl.
By Twinkle Khanna
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
A gangly young girl transforms her village with a revolutionary idea. Sixty-eight-year-old Noni Appa finds herself drawn to a married man-- 'Why do people have to define relationships, underline each word till the paper gives way beneath?', she wonders. Bablu Tripathi becomes obsessed with sanitary napkins much to his family's horror, and a young woman keeps checking the weather forecast as she meticulously plans each of her five weddings. Funny, observant and wise, this is storytelling at its most irresistible.
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian
Tuesday, May 27, 2014. 1:30 PM.
Frequently mistaken for one another in spite of very different natures, brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue respective lives in rebellion-torn 1960s Calcutta until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds.
By Jhumpa Lahiri
Recommended By Lakshmi Kasturi, Library Clerk
“A portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.”
Became the movie: The Namesake.
By Kamala Markandaya
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
“This critically acclaimed novel tells the story of India and its people through the eyes of one woman and her experiences in one peasant family in a primitive Indian village (From the Publisher).”
By Fatima Farheen Mirza
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director
A story of family identity and belonging follows an Indian family through the marriage of their daughter, from the parents' arrival in the United States to the return of their estranged son.
By Ratika Kapur
Committed to doing her part in realizing the new Indian dream for her family by working as a receptionist in Delhi and taking care of the home, while her husband works in Dubai, Mrs. Sharma's conversation with a stranger may change everything.
Genres: Cultural Fiction; Asian Fiction; Indian Fiction; Domestic Fiction; Literary Fiction; Romance/Love Stories
Combining Indian myths, epic history, and the story of three college kids in search of America, a narrative includes the monkey's story of an Indian poet and warrior and an American road novel of college students driving cross-country.
By Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Recommended By Kalpana Mehta, Reference Librarian
“Interweaving the stories of Kavita, Somer, and the child that binds both of their destinies, Secret Daughter poignantly explores the emotional terrain of motherhood, loss, identity, and love, as witnessed through the lives of two families one Indian, one American and the child that indelibly connects them (From the Publisher).”
By Thrity N. Umrigar
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
After being fired from her job as a servant, Bhima forms a partnership with Parvati to sell produce at the local market and makes her first true friend.
For the Chatterjees, an upper-caste Calcutta family fallen on hard times but tenaciously remain in their decaying mansion of mystery and faded glory, using storytelling from generation to generation as a lifeline.
By Sujata Massey
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director
Kamala, a young peasant woman from West Bengal is drawn into a forbidden romance in 1930s Calcutta and is caught between the country’s independence movement and the British colonial society in which she lives (From the Publisher).
Set in modern-day India, it is the story of Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife and Bhima, who has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years.
By Sejal Badani
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian
After suffering a third heart-breaking miscarriage and the unraveling of her marriage, Jaya goes to India and uncovers answers about her family's past, specifically about her pioneering grandmother and her life under British occupation.
By Rohinton Mistry
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
“…A moving domestic tragi-comedy that introduces readers to Gustad Noble, a devout Parsi and dedicated family man, who becomes enmeshed in the corruption of the Indira Gandhi years. His journey back to himself manages to be comical and heartbreaking, deeply compassionate and unsparing (From the Publisher).”
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
A collection of nine short stories about East Indian Americans, their social life and their customs.
By Corban Addison
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
Orphaned and homeless after a tsunami decimates their coastal India town, teenage sisters Ahalya and Sita Ghai are abducted and sold to a Mumbai brothel owner before they are helped by an American attorney fighting human trafficking.
By Aravind Adiga
Recommended By Lakshmi Kasturi, Library Clerk, Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
Relocating to New Delhi when he is offered a new job, Balram Halwai is disillusioned by the city's twenty-first-century materialism and technology-spawned violence, a circumstance that forces him to question his loyalties, ambitions, and past.
By Sujata Massey
Series Perveen Mistry Series
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk
In 1921, Bombay's first female lawyer, Oxford graduate Perveen Mistry, investigates a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows living in strict seclusion who become subject to a murderous guardian's schemes for their inheritances.
By Thrity Umrigar
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian
Tuesday, October 8, 2013. 7:30 PM.
Follows four friends who met as university students in Bombay in the late 1970s as they struggle to reconnect and reunite at the deathbed of one of their group.