15 Best Books to Read in Monsoon, Matched to Your Rain Day

Raju is a railway station guide in Malgudi with a gift for telling people exactly what they want to hear. That gift carries him through a dancer named Rosie, a stretch of real success, and then jail. When he comes out he shelters in a village temple and the villagers decide he must be a swami. A drought arrives, the villagers decide the swami will fast until it rains, and Raju never quite finds the moment to tell them the truth. Narayan keeps it light right up to the point where it stops being light at all.

Frater grew up in the New Hebrides with a print of an Indian monsoon on his bedroom wall, and decades later he came here to follow the real one from its arrival on the Kerala coast up to Cherrapunji in the north east. He stands at Kovalam with meteorologists and fishermen waiting for the burst, then chases the weather up the country through Goa, Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta, mostly by train, mostly soaked. His reporting on the Meteorological Department alone is worth the price. He is also very funny about how an entire country loses its head on the same afternoon.

Rahel and Estha are seven-year-old twins in Ayemenem, a Kerala town where the river swells and the family pickle factory smells of vinegar. Their English cousin visits, something happens at the river, and a household that was already cracked comes apart along caste lines. Roy tells it out of order, opening with the aftermath and walking backwards into it, so the dread keeps building even though you already know the shape of the ending. The rain is in everything: the green, the damp, the mould, the river that is a playground in the morning and a threat by evening.

Karuthamma is the daughter of a Hindu fisherman on the Kerala coast, and Pareekutti is a young Muslim trader who loves her, which everybody in the village already knows. The place runs on an old belief: while a fisherman is out on the water, his wife's chastity is the thing holding the sea back. Thakazhi wrote it in Malayalam in 1956 and it became the story every Malayali grows up knowing. What earns your time is not the tragedy, which you can see arriving, but the texture: the beach economy, the loans, the drying fish, the daily arithmetic of who may marry whom.

Piya is an American scientist studying Irrawaddy dolphins in the Sundarbans. Kanai is a Delhi businessman visiting his aunt and carrying his dead uncle's notebook. Fokir is a fisherman who cannot read and knows the water better than either of them will ever know anything. Ghosh braids their present with Morichjhapi, a real refugee settlement that the state cleared by force in 1979, and then lets the tide country do the rest. Islands here appear and vanish twice a day, which makes the ground itself feel temporary, and the final hundred pages are a cyclone.

An astrologer who cannot read anybody's future, a boy walking a stolen dog, a postman who holds back a telegram out of kindness, a talkative man on a bench. Narayan built Malgudi across decades and filled it with clerks, vendors, teachers, uncles and small-time frauds, and each story runs six to twelve pages. Nothing enormous happens in most of them. Somebody's small plan meets the world, and the world wins politely. The Penguin edition most people own is the expanded one from 1982, which folds in stories from an earlier collection.

This is a mix of essays, diary entries, poems and short pieces from Bond's years in the hills above Dehradun. He writes about the monsoon arriving in Landour, about leaking roofs and leeches and the particular boredom of a fortnight inside a cloud, about the walk to the bazaar and the people who live along his road. There is no argument here and no arc. It is a writer noticing things for a couple of hundred pages, and in the right mood it is the most comforting book on this list.

Em is the mother: funny, filthy-mouthed, adored, and ill in a way that hollows the family out. The Big Hoom is the father, steady to the point of being unreadable. The narrator is their son, moving between the flat in Mahim and the hospital ward, trying to work out who his mother was before the illness and whether that person is still somewhere inside. Pinto refuses to make any of it uplifting or hopeless. It is a novel about living beside mental illness rather than a guide to it, and it is far funnier than that sentence makes it sound.

The unnamed narrator grows up in Calcutta on the stories of his older cousin Tridib, who teaches him to imagine places precisely enough to own them. The book moves between 1960s Calcutta, wartime London and Dhaka, circling one event it takes the narrator the whole novel to be able to say out loud: the communal riots of 1964, which happened on both sides of a border at once and were reported as though they were separate weather systems. Ghosh is arguing about how nations decide what to remember, and he does it entirely through one family's furniture and quarrels.

A paid companion to a rich American woman meets a widower in Monte Carlo, marries him inside a few weeks, and comes home to Manderley, a great house on the Cornish coast. She is never given a name. Everyone there, above all the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, still lives by the standards of the first Mrs de Winter, and the new wife spends the book shrinking to fit a dead woman's outline. Du Maurier builds it out of weather, corridors and small social humiliations until the sea gives up what it has been holding, and then the last third moves very fast.

Heathcliff is brought back from Liverpool as a boy and raised at Wuthering Heights alongside Catherine Earnshaw. What grows between them is not romance in any usable sense of the word: it is possession, and it wrecks two households across two generations. Bronte tells the whole thing through servants and tenants, which puts a wall of gossip between you and the people it happened to. The weather here is not decoration. The wind, the moor and the ice are the reason people cannot leave, cannot arrive and cannot be found when they walk out at night.

Richard, a Californian on scholarship, talks his way into a tiny Greek class taught by a professor who picks his students personally. The group is rich, strange and closed, and Richard wants in badly enough to lie about where he comes from. Tartt gives away the murder in the opening pages, so the tension is never who or whether, it is how a set of clever young people talked themselves into it and what it does to them afterwards. The Vermont winter carries a lot of the weight: cold, dark, and apparently endless.

Toru Watanabe hears a Beatles song on a plane and is thrown back to 1969: his best friend's death, his slow entanglement with that friend's girlfriend Naoko, and Midori, who is alive in a way Naoko can no longer manage. There is nothing supernatural in it, which surprises people who know Murakami from his stranger books. It is a plain, sad novel about being twenty and discovering that loving somebody is not a treatment for what is wrong with them. The quiet is the whole point, and rain suits it exactly.

Jose Arcadio Buendia founds Macondo in a swamp, and Marquez follows his descendants through civil wars, a banana company, a massacre the government erases from the record, and a rain that arrives and simply refuses to leave. Everybody is named after somebody else, which is deliberately disorienting, and the family tree printed in most editions exists for a reason. What holds it together is the tone: the impossible and the domestic get reported in exactly the same voice, so a woman rising into the sky carries the same weight as a bad harvest.

Mrs Rupa Mehra wants Lata married to a suitable boy. Lata has her own ideas, three suitors, and a country changing around her: the first general election, land reform, a communal riot, plus students, poets, shoemakers and politicians who all get chapters of their own. Seth writes plainly and moves quickly, so the length is much less frightening in your hands than it looks on a shelf. It is the closest thing Indian writing in English has to a nineteenth century social novel, and it is genuinely funny about mothers.