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Malgudi Days
R. K. Narayan
Short stories, 1943
Gentle short stories set in the fictional south Indian town of Malgudi, capturing everyday life, tradition and small-town character in the 20th century.
Books set in India
Seven books by writers from India, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Malgudi Days and A Fine Balance.
About the literature of India
India's literature is written in many languages, from Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Urdu to English, and Rabindranath Tagore, writing in Bengali, became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Behind the modern novel lie oral tales, long traditions of poetry, and the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Translation is bringing more to English: Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand, from Hindi, won the International Booker Prize in 2022.
Family, caste, religion, the legacy of empire and Partition recur. R. K. Narayan's gentle tales of the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi make a lovely way in. Arundhati Roy's Booker-winning The God of Small Things is a lyrical, intense story of twins in Kerala, and Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy is a vast, absorbing family saga set in the early 1950s.
By writers from India
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A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Novel, 1995
Follows two tailors and two other lodgers in an unnamed coastal city during the 1975–77 Emergency, showing caste violence and slum life.
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
Novel, 1997
Set in Ayemenem, Kerala, it explores caste, Syrian Christian families, communism and forbidden love in the 1960s and 1990s.
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
Novel, 1993
Panoramic portrait of early 1950s north India, covering land reform, Hindu-Muslim tensions, law, politics and family life in a fictional town, Brahmpur.
The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai
Novel, 2005
Set in Kalimpong in the 1980s during the Gorkhaland unrest, showing post-colonial tensions in the Himalayan foothills.
The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
Novel, 2008
A driver's darkly comic narrative exposes the gulf between rural poverty and Delhi and Bangalore's booming, corrupt, modern India.
Train to Pakistan
Khushwant Singh
Novel, 1956
Tells of a Punjabi border village, Mano Majra, caught in the violence of the 1947 Partition.
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