A Good Indian Wife
by Anne Cherian
Handsome anesthesiologist Neel prides himself on his decisiveness, both in and out of the operating room. So when he agrees to return to India to visit his ailing grand­father, he is sure hell be able to resist his familys pleas that he marry a good Indian girl. With a girlfriend and a promising career back in San Francisco, the last thing Neel needs is an arranged marriage.

Almost Single
by Kala Advaita
Aisha Bathia is an independent 29-year-old single woman living in New Delhi working as a guest relations manager at the five-star Grand Orchid Hotel. The job seems fabulous, but in reality the hours are bad and so is the pay. And Bathia's life as a modern woman is small compensation: a 29-year-old woman in India is not supposed to be unmarried. With her two best friends, Misha and Anushka (recently divorced from her cheating husband), Bathia searches for love, trying everything from online dating to fasting during Karva Chauth, the traditional Hindu festival for married women.

Animal's People
by Indra SInha
Orphaned Bhopal slum resident Animal, who used to be human before an industrial chemical accident left his bones twisted like a hairpin, narrates in a rich argot this tense and absorbing Brit import, shortlisted for the Booker in 2007. Animal, who walks on all fours, focuses on the events surrounding the impending trial of the Kampani responsible for the accident. He falls in with a group led by famous musician Somraj; Somraj's daughter, Nisha; and Nisha's boyfriend, Saint Zafar, who devotes his life to fighting the Kampani and caring for the poor.

Blind Faith
by Sagarika Ghose
Mia Bhagat is a 28-year-old London-based Bengali reeling from the inexplicable suicide of her Marxist-turned-Mystic father. Her job as a TV reporter introduces her to Karna, an initiate of the conservative, utopian Purification Journey Brotherhood (men should fight the female ego) who's also the spitting image of a figure from her late father's painting of the Kumbh Mela, or Ganga River Festival of the Pitcher. Mia falls for him hard, but her mother arranges a marriage to a kind cosmetics entrepreneur named Vik Ray, with whom Mia moves to New Delhi. There, she enters the whirlwind of her husband's extravagant parties and secretly waits for Karna.

Breathless in Bombay: Stories
by Murzban Shroff
Bombay-born Shroff opens a window on that city's commercial bustle, as lived in the heads of its people (as his introduction puts it) one profession at a time. The opening Dhobi Ghat, follows Mataprasad Mahadev, 53, delivering laundry, and establishes a pattern followed by later stories of Bombay inhabitants.

Companions of Paradise
by Thalassa Ali
Mariana Givens aches to return to the rose-scented city of Lahore, home of Hassan Ali Khan, the Muslim stranger she has come to love, his mystical family, and his prescient little son. But her own reckless behavior has sent her into exile at the British cantonment near Kabul, on the eve of the First Afghan War. There, she embarks on a dangerous double life, pretending to be a proper young Victorian lady while secretly traveling Kabul's violent, fascinating streets to visit the Sufi seer who possesses the answers she needs. But the mystic's help comes with a price, and her family wants her to marry a British officer. As Afghanistan descends into violence and her hopes of rescue fade, Mariana must make a fateful decision: can she abandon her old life and allow herself to be drawn toward her destiny-whatever it may be? The final installment of Thalassa's Paradise Trilogy following A Singular Hostage and A Beggar at the Gate.

Dropped From Heaven
by Sophie Judah
The 19 stories in Judah's debut explore the little known Jewish community of Bene Israel in India over the course of more than a century. Though Judah touches on a wide array of topics in these vignette-like stories of life in the fictional town of Jwalangar-the fusion of Jewish and Indian (both Hindi and Muslim) customs, the India-Pakistan partition, the birth of Israel-the most prevalent theme is the underappreciated strength and wisdom of the community's women.

In the Convent of Little Flowers
by Indu Sundaresan
Sundaresan bluntly questions how evolved the globalized world truly is in these stories of individuals trapped between India's archaic traditions and blitz into modernity.

Sea of Poppies
by Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh's picaresque epic of the voyage of the Ibis, a ship transporting Indian girmitiyas (coolies) to Mauritius in 1838. The first two-thirds of the book chronicles how the crew and the human cargo come to the vessel, now owned by rising opium merchant Benjamin Burnham. Mulatto second mate Zachary Reid, a 20-year-old of Lord Jim-ike innocence, is passing for white and doesn't realize his secret is known to the gomusta (overseer) of the coolies, Baboo Nob Kissin, an educated Falstaffian figure who believes Zachary is the key to realizing his lifelong mission.

Slumdog Millionaire
by Vikas Swarup
When Ram Mohammad Thomas, an orphaned, uneducated waiter from Mumbai, wins a billion rupees on a quiz show, he finds himself thrown in jail. (Unable to pay out the prize, the program's producers bribed local authorities to declare Ram a cheater.) Enter attractive lawyer Smita Shah, to get Ram out of prison and listen to him explain, via flashbacks, how he knew the answers to all the show's questions.

The Forbidden Daughter
by Shobhan Bantwal
For most young couples, news of their unborn child's gender brings joyful anticipation. Not so for Isha Tilak and her husband, Nikhil. They already have a beloved daughter, but Nikhil's parents, hard-wired to favor male children above all, coldly reject little Priya at every turn. Vain and selfish, they see female grandchildren as burdens, and would just as soon never meet the one growing in Isha's belly. Even the obstetrician agrees, going so far as to suggest the unthinkable, throwing Nikhil into a rage and changing Isha's life forever.

The Palace of Illusions
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Born from fire and marked with the prophecy that she will change the course of history, the strong-willed Princess Panchaali declares early on that she won't spend her life merely supporting the men around her. Soon enough, she bucks tradition by simultaneously wedding all five famous Pandava brothers, who have been denied their rightful kingdom, and finds herself the happy mistress of the much-envied palace of illusions. Princess Panchaali's joy is short-lived, however, when hubris, fate and the desire for vengeance in reclaiming the Pandavas' kingdom (all also prophesied) cause her and her husbands to make mistakes that have cascading political effects, shattering peace in the region.

The Seeker: A Novel
by Sudhir Kakar
In 1925, Indias struggle for independence is in disarray, impeded by factionalism among its leaders and rising incidents of unrest across the country. Meanwhile, having withdrawn himself from active politics, Mahatma Gandhi is in an ashram immersed in what he considers the most important undertaking of his life - the creation of a community that is wholly dedicated to the highest standards of self-discipline, tolerance, and austerity. Into this world comes a young British woman named Madeline, the daughter of a British admiral. Madeline has set her heart on becoming Gandhis greatest disciple. Madelines wish to serve him soon becomes an all-consuming desire to be near him at all times. Based on true events.

The Toss of a Lemon
by Padma Viswanathan
Spanning the lifetime of one woman (1896-1962), The Toss of a Lemon brings readers intimately into a Brahmin household, into an India in the midst of social and political upheaval. Married at ten, widowed at eighteen, left with two children, Sivakami must wear widow's whites, shave her head, and touch no one from dawn to dusk. She is extremely orthodox in her behavior except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband's house and village to raise her children. That decision sets the course of her children's and grandchildren's lives, twisting their fates in surprising, sometimes heartbreaking ways.

The White Tiger: A Novel
by Aravind Adiga
In this darkly comic début novel set in India, Balram, a chauffeur, murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a "social entrepreneur." In a series of letters to the Premier of China, in anticipation of the leader's upcoming visit to Balram's homeland, the chauffeur recounts his transformation from an honest, hardworking boy growing up in "the Darkness"-those areas of rural India where education and electricity are equally scarce, and where villagers banter about local elections "like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra"-to a determined killer.