Author: Baldwin, Shauna Singh
Title: What the Body Remembers
PW
Set in Punjab against the background of the coming partition between India and Pakistan, What The Body Remembers tells the story of a Sikh family facing their own personal issues of authority and control as a man takes a second wife.

Author: Chaudhuri, Amit
Title: Freedom Song
PWKirkus
In three short novels, readers follow the life experiences of the intimate world of Indian men, women, and children of the middle class living in Calcutta, Bombay, and England.

Author: Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee
Title: Sister of My Heart
LJ
From the bestselling author of The Mistress of Spices comes a passionate novel about the extraordinary bond between two sisters and the family secrets, jealousies, and loves that threaten to tear them apart.

Author: Desai, Kiran
Title: Hullaballo in the Guava Grove
KirkusLJ
Kiran Desai offers a wryly hilarious and poignant story of life, love, and family relationships, simultaneously capturing the vivid culture of the Indian subcontinent and the universal intricacies of human experience.

Author: Forbes, Leslie
Title: Bombay Ice
Kirkus
Starring "the toughest, most sympathetic heroine since Smilla's Sense of Snow (Harper's Bazaar), this thriller set in exotic India tells the intriguing story of a British journalist whose life is put in jeopardy after a brutal murder.

Author: Ganesan, Indira
Title: Inheritance
BL
"A lithe and sinuous storyteller . . . Ganesan, like Arundhati Roy and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is part of a glorious flowering of contemporary Indian literature."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist

Author: Rangel-Riberio, Victor
Title: Tivolem
LJBL
Filled with rich, tantalizing detail, gentle humor, and ghosts of a history both international and personal, this warm, sweeping portrait of a small village in a Portuguese colony in India in the 1930s transports readers to a magical place and time gone forever.

Author: Vakil, Ardashir
Title: Beach Boy
Kirkus
With the collapse of his parents' marriage and his father's sudden death, the ten-year-old son of a successful shipping broker finds himself caught between the innocence of youth and the responsibilities of adulthood.

Author: Chandra, Vikram
Title: Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories
PWKirkus
On the heels of his award-winning and extravagantly praised first novel, RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN, Vikram Chandra offers five ingeniously linked stories--a love story, a mystery, a ghost story, and other tales spun by an elusive narrator sitting in a smoky Bombay bar. Critics around the world have embraced the book as a major work by this exciting young writer.

Author: Ghosh, Amitav
Title: The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery
PWLJ
In a near-future New York City, the mysterious reappearance of a lost and battered ID card leads us back in time to 1995 Calcutta--and to the card's enigmatic owner, L. Murugan. A driven eccentric obsessed with the weird coincidences that led to British scientist Ronald Ross' groundbreaking discovery of how humans contract malaria, Murugan has stumbled upon evidence of a powerful unseen society and an impossible experiment in controlled destiny. In doing so, he has opened a Pandora's Box of dark and startling truths that will have momentous consequences for everyone and everything human.

Author: Mistry, Rohinton
Title: A Fine Balance
PW
With the compassionate realism of Dickens and a narrative sweep worthy of Balzac, this internationally acclaimed novel draws an unforgettable portrait of the cruelty and corruption, kindness and heroism of India. Set in 1975, A Fine Balance follows the destinies of four strangers who are forced to share a cramped apartment in an unnamed city by the sea.

Author: Roy, Arundhati
Title: The God of Small Things
BLPWKirkus
"A banquet for all the senses", said Newsweek of this bestselling and Booker Prize-winning literary novel--a richly textured first book about the tragic decline of one family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love.

Prior to 1997 (listed in order of publication, newest at the top)

Author: Rushdie, Salman
Title: The Moor's Last Sigh
PWKirkus
Winner of England's prestigious Whitbread Ward, Rushdie's first novel in seven years is a peppery melange of genres: a deliciously inventive family saga; a subversive alternate history of modern India; a fairy tale as inexhaustibly imagined as any in The Arabian Nights; and a book of ideas on topics from art to ethnicity, from religious fanaticism to the terrifying power of love.

Author: Desai, Anita
Title: Journey to Ithaca
Kirkus
A spiritual quest takes Sophie and Matteo to India, where Matteo is drawn toward the Mother, a charismatic and mysterious guru. In an effort to reclaim her lover, Sophie embarks on her own journey for the truth about the Mother's past and finds that wisdom is found in the journey itself, not at its destination.

Author: Tharoor, Shashi
Title: Show Business
Kirkus
A triumphant new novel about the movie industry by the author of The Great Indian Novel. Tharoor's hero is Ashok Banjara, one of India's mega movie stars, a man of great ambition and dubious morals. Tharoor portrays the Indian film world as a metaphor for Indian society and weaves a tapestry of seduction and betrayal that is colorful--and serious.

Author: Sidhwa, Bapsi
Title: Cracking India
Kirkus
Eight-year-old Lenny, spirited daughter of an affluent Parsee family, narrates the story of the breaking of India as she witnesses Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs fight for their land and their lives during the dividing of the country into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947. This 1991 Liberatur Prize winner, NYT Notable Book and ALA Notable nominee is now available in paperback for the first time.

Nonfiction

• India In Mind
  Author: Mishra, Pankaj (ed)
  Publisher: Vintage $ 14 ISBN: 0375727450 Date: 2005
  Booklist
  Anyone who is enthralled by India--or who loves fine writing--will delight in this compendium of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry written by 25 of the country's most astute observers.
  Updated 11.2.04
• The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period
  Author: Mehta, Ved
  Publisher: Thunder's Mouth $ 22.95 ISBN: 1560256281 Date: 2004
  KirkusBooklist
  When, as a boy, Mehta finds his father weeping uncontrollably on his mother's shoulder during a New York dinner party, he begins to unravel a family mystery that takes him on a painful and revealing voyage into his father's past in the exotic, closed world of British India.
  Updated 10.19.04
• Maximum City: Bombay
  Author: Mehta, Suketu
  Publisher: Knopf $ 27.95 ISBN: 0375403728 Date: 2004
  PWLJ
  A brilliantly illuminating portrait of Bombay and its people-a book as vast, diverse, and rich in experience, incident, and sensation as the city itself-from an award-winning Indian-American fiction writer and journalist. - Publisher Marketing.
  Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
  Updated 9.22.04
• Marahanis: The Extraordinary Tale of Four Indian Queens and Their Journey From Purdah to Parliament
  Author: Moore, Lucy
  Publisher: Viking $ 25.95 ISBN: 0670033685 Date: 2005
  Booklist
  Tracing larger-than-life-characters, Moore creates a vivid picture of an emerging modern, democratic society in India and the tumultuous period of imperialism from which it arose in this study of four Indian queens and their journey from Purdah to Parliament.
  Updated 11.29.04