12 Best Novels Set in Delhi, Plus 3 That Are Not Fiction

The book opens with a crash on the Inner Ring Road at five in the morning and a servant called Ajay sitting in the driver's seat of a car he was not driving. From there Kapoor goes backwards and outwards, into Ajay's childhood in a bonded labour household, into Sunny Wadia's world of penthouses and farmhouse parties, and into a journalist trying to write about a family that owns half the state's construction contracts. It moves like crime fiction and reads like a class autopsy. The Delhi here is the one built after 1991: liquor licences, land deals, gyms and the men who clean up afterwards.

Anjum is born in Old Delhi, raised as a boy, and moves into the Khwabgah, the house where the city's hijra community lives. After Gujarat in 2002 she leaves and settles in a graveyard behind a government hospital, adding rooms until it becomes a guest house and then a small republic. Around her the novel spreads out to Kashmir, to Jantar Mantar during the anti corruption protests, to an abandoned baby and four people who love the same woman. It is a difficult, crowded, furious book that changes shape halfway through, and Delhi is the ground everyone keeps returning to.

Bim stayed. She teaches history, looks after an alcoholic brother, and lives in the family house as it fills with dust and stray cats. Tara left, married a diplomat, and comes home to visit with the careful cheerfulness of a guest. Over a few hot days the novel moves backwards to 1947, when the city burned across the river and the children of this house heard it from the roof without understanding it. Desai writes heat, boredom and family resentment better than almost anyone, and the plot is simply the slow admission of what each sister did to the other.

Written in 1940, this is the walled city recorded from inside by a man who grew up there. Mir Nihal keeps pigeons, has a mistress, and watches his world thin out around him. His son Asghar wants to marry for love, which the household treats as a scandal. The Delhi around them is narrow lanes, poets, kite fights, the cries of vendors and the visible humiliation of the 1911 Durbar. Ali wrote in English about an Urdu speaking world, and the effect is of a translation from a language the book never names. Nothing here is closer to a primary source.

Khushwant Singh spent decades on this and it shows in both the ambition and the mess. A cynical narrator who resembles the author moves between his present day life in Delhi, including his relationship with Bhagmati, a hijra woman, and a series of historical chapters told by builders, invaders, poets and eunuchs across six hundred years. Some chapters are superb, one or two are dull, and the final section on the anti Sikh violence of 1984 is the reason the book still matters. Singh was there for that, and he spares nobody, least of all himself.

The bomb goes off in the opening pages, in a crowded market, and it is deliberately a small one, the kind that gets four paragraphs in the newspaper. Two brothers die and their friend survives to carry it. Mahajan then tracks the Khurana parents through years of grief and activism, the surviving boy into a politics nobody around him expected, and, in the book's bravest move, the bombmaker through his own logic. The Delhi here is the ordinary one of markets, DDA flats, traffic and television news, which is exactly why the violence lands so hard.

Balram Halwai narrates his own rise across seven letters, from a village he calls the Darkness to a car service in Bangalore, and the middle of the book is Delhi seen from the driver's seat and the basement parking. He waits outside malls he is not allowed to enter. He sleeps under the building with the other drivers, watching mosquitoes and television. He drives his employers to hotels and to bribe ministers. The city is a machine for keeping men like him invisible, and Adiga's joke is that Balram understands the machine far better than his employers do.

Sahadevan comes to Delhi from Kerala as a young man and stays, in rented rooms and government quarters, taking small jobs and holding other migrants together. The novel runs from the war with China through the Emergency and the killings of 1984 to the end of the century, and the great events arrive the way they actually arrive for ordinary people, as rumours, curfews and neighbours who stop coming home. Mukundan lived this life for four decades and the detail is unshowy and exact. It is a sad book about a city that takes everything and hands back a pension.

Justice Laxmi Narayan Thakur named his five daughters in alphabetical order and lives with them on Hailey Road in a house with a mango tree and far too many opinions. Debjani, the fourth, lands a job reading the English news on Doordarshan. Dylan Singh Shekhawat is a reporter working on the killings of 1984 and he is precisely the wrong man for a family that wants a quiet rishta. Chauhan writes Delhi dialogue better than anyone working today, the specific rhythm of aunties, servants, cousins and neighbours all talking at once, without turning any of it into a joke about India.

Faruqi wrote this in Urdu and then translated it into English himself, which is why the English feels like nothing else on the shelf. It follows Wazir Khanam, a real historical figure and the mother of the poet Dagh, through a series of relationships with powerful men, none of which she enters as a victim. Around her, Faruqi rebuilds the Delhi of the 1800s in enormous detail: dyeing and weaving, painting workshops, the mushaira, the grammar of manners, the price of everything. It is very long and completely uninterested in hurrying for your convenience.

Arjun Bhatia arrives as a refugee after Partition and builds an arms business that eventually makes him necessary to politicians, policemen and industrialists. The book moves between his rise and a present in which his sons are fighting over what he built. Ray writes this as full blooded commercial fiction, with cliffhangers, betrayals and dialogue that clearly expects to be filmed. It is not trying to be literature, and it is much better than it needs to be, particularly about how power in Delhi actually works: through favours owed rather than offices held.

The Jhas have lived for decades in an east Delhi housing complex where everybody knows what everybody paid for their sofa. Then Mr Jha sells a website and they buy a house in Gurgaon, and the comedy comes from how badly they perform their new class: the imported sofa, the fake designer labels, the neighbour with the show car, the wife who misses her balcony gossip and cannot say so. Basu is affectionate rather than cruel about all of it, and the funniest scenes are the ones where nobody in the room knows its rules.

Not a novel. Dalrymple moved to Delhi in his twenties and spent a year interviewing Sufis, eunuchs, pigeon fanciers, Partition survivors and archaeologists, working backwards through the layers from the Delhi of 1989 to the Mughals, the Sultanate and finally the Mahabharata site. His landlady Mrs Puri and his taxi driver Balvinder Singh hold the present day thread and are very funny company. It is thirty years old now, which means the modern Delhi inside it has become history too, and that has made the book stranger and more useful than it was on publication.

Not a novel. Dasgupta spent years talking to the people who got rich after liberalisation and to the people who got in their way: builders, a plastic surgeon, a woman whose land was taken, the sons of industrialists who have never been told no. His argument is that the boom was built on land, on damage inherited from the Partition generation, and on a violence everybody has agreed to describe as ambition instead. It is a hostile book in places and Dasgupta knows that. He was living the life he was reporting on, and he says so.

Not a novel. Sethi met Mohammed Ashraf at Bara Tooti Chowk, where men wait each morning to be hired for the day, and spent five years drinking, arguing and taking notes with him. Ashraf paints signboards, used to be a butcher, and is funny, evasive and entirely uninterested in producing the tidy life story a journalist has come for. The book is about that resistance as much as it is about him. It is the shortest thing on this list and the one I press on people most often, because it lets a poor man be complicated instead of symbolic.