Leaving India by Minal Hajratwala

Leaving India tells the story of the Indian diaspora through the author’s extended family who, over the years, migrated from India to Fiji, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and the United States. That’s fascinating historical and personal material, but unfortunately written in a rather dry, stilted, and too often self-satisfied manner especially when it [...]

Q&A by Vikas Swarup

Q & A is the delightful novel that inspired the movie Slumdog Millionaire so the suspense was off since I’d seen the movie before reading the book (he wins and game show and he gets the girl!) — but I very much enjoyed the written story, which is actually quite different from the one told [...]

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Since I recently made fun of over-the-top Indian epics I must admit that Cutting for Stone features conjoined twins, political coups, a miraculously avoided plane crash, female circumcision, death by syphilis,  death by typhoid, and that does not even include the pregnant nun from chapter 1. But Cutting for Stone works – at least for [...]

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Sea of Poppies is praised an epic saga of English occupation in India, the opium trade, and the near-slavery trade of coolies to Mauritius during the 19th century. I thought it was a vast soap opera crossed with Bollywood accents and overdone ethnic and anachronistic flavors. The characters span the gamut of stereotypes, from the [...]

Family Planning by Karan Mahajan

The hero of Family Planning is a teenage boy with 12 siblings (or perhaps 13?) because his father’s very complicated relationship with the person who turns out to be his stepmother, not his mother, requires that she be pregnant at all times. In an understandable attempt to escape his chaotic home life the father is busy [...]

The Forbidden Daughter by Shobhan Bantwal

The Forbidden Daughter is the predictable, preachy, and boring story of an Indian woman pregnant with her second daughter whose in-laws and physician suggest she get an abortion and try for a boy instead. In soap-opera manner her husband is murdered and she leaves her in-laws’ home to escape their nagging despite having no means of [...]

Marrying Anita by Anita Jain

Anita, the author, is having difficulties finding a husband in New York city, having been unable to find one in London where she used to live as a carefree and cosmopolitan journalist. Considering that her quest involves going out to party and drink heavily with men who are married or have girlfriends in other cities, [...]

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Are you tired of novels about India that come in thick tomes complete with arranged marriages, saris, and intricate family stories? Meet The White Tiger, a reasonable-length book with only a few, discrete arranged marriages that are entirely peripheral to the action, no saris, and one small and relatively uncomplicated family. Written as a long [...]

Hullabalo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai

Hullaballo in the Guava Orchard is a goofy comedy built around a failed post office clerk who climbs into a tree and unexpectedly becomes a revered holy man. There’s a gallery of funny characters and glimpses of the corrupt Indian civil service (the postmaster uses his clerks to prepare for this daughter’s wedding, for instance) [...]

The Age of Shiva by Manil Puri

The Age of Shiva is a soap opera set in India. There’s the duplicitous sister, the lecherous husband, the long-suffering wife, the devious younger sister playing their expected roles against exotic (for us) backgrounds of arranged marriages, flower-strewn festivals, and civil unrest. The first half of the book is captivating enough and Puri does a [...]