The 12 Best R. K. Narayan Books, Ranked, and Where to Start

Thirty-two stories set in Malgudi, a South Indian town Narayan made up and then furnished so completely that people still argue about which real place it is. The pieces are deliberately small. An astrologer working by lamplight at a village fair recognises a customer from a very bad night years ago. A postman decides which letters to hand over and when, and pays for the decision. Most run six or eight pages and almost none of them land where you expect. What holds the collection together is a narrator who never raises his voice and never quite lets anybody off. First published in 1943, expanded for readers outside India in 1982.

Raju runs a small tourist-guide business out of Malgudi railway station and tells visitors whatever they want to hear, which turns out to be a transferable skill. He meets Marco, a scholar who cares more about cave paintings than about his wife, and Rosie, the wife, a dancer from a community respectable Malgudi looks down on. Raju becomes her manager and then more than that, forges a signature, and goes to prison. On release he sits down in a ruined temple beside a dry river, is taken for a holy man by a village that badly needs one, and feels the role close around him. Two timelines run in parallel and meet on the last page.

Krishna teaches English at a mission college, grumbles about marking, and is quietly delighted when his wife and small daughter come to live with him. The first half is domestic comfort recorded in close detail: rent, vegetables, a child learning to talk, a husband who does not know how lucky he is. Then typhoid arrives. The second half follows Krishna trying to reach his wife after her death, first through grief and later through a medium who takes dictation from her. Narayan lost his own young wife a few years before he wrote this, and the book never pretends otherwise.

Swaminathan is ten, bad at arithmetic, loyal to the wrong people, and permanently on the edge of trouble he did not plan. His world is the classroom, the street, and a cricket team assembled with more ambition than equipment. Around him the nationalist agitation of the 1930s bubbles up, and he joins a protest mostly because his friends are in it. The comedy is exact about how children actually think, and the last stretch turns without warning into a book about losing a friend. Graham Greene read the manuscript, found it a publisher, and talked him into shortening his name for English readers.

Margayya sits under a banyan tree outside the co-operative bank with a tin box, filling in loan forms for villagers who cannot read them and taking a cut of the proceeds. He is greedy, vain, superstitious, and completely recognisable. A run of luck and a stretch of shrewdness turn him into the richest man in Malgudi, and the money then goes to work on his household, particularly on Balu, a son who has been given everything and asked for nothing. Narayan tracks the rise with real comic relish and the fall with none at all.

Nataraj runs a small printing press and a large circle of loafers who use his front room as a club. Vasu, a taxidermist with enormous arms and no manners, installs himself in the attic, fills it with dead animals, and starts treating the whole town as his supply. Nataraj is far too well brought up to throw him out, which is the joke and also the horror. The plot builds towards a temple elephant and a festival, and Narayan is openly borrowing the shape of the old myth about a demon who is given a boon that destroys him.

Jagan sells sweets, reads the Bhagavad Gita between customers, keeps two sets of accounts, and believes his frugality is a spiritual practice. His son Mali goes to America, comes back with a foreign partner and a business plan involving a machine that writes stories, and expects his father to fund it. The generational collision is handled without a single villain: Jagan's piety is partly a performance, Mali's contempt is partly fair, and both of them are lonely. The book is a hundred and forty pages and it does not waste one of them.

Narayan grew up in Madras in his grandmother's house, was taught arithmetic and Sanskrit by her, failed and repeated exams, drifted through jobs he was unfit for, and decided to be a writer at a time when Indians writing novels in English were a rounding error. The memoir covers the manuscript that went around London until Graham Greene rescued it, the marriage he chose against the horoscopes, his wife's early death, and the long working years after. He writes about all of it with the same steady voice, which somehow makes the hard parts harder.

Savitri keeps house for Ramani, an insurance office manager who treats his family as an audience for his moods. When he begins an affair with a woman at his office and stops concealing it, Savitri shuts herself in a storeroom, then walks out of the house entirely. What follows is the most unsparing stretch Narayan ever wrote, because the world outside offers her almost nothing: no training, no earnings of her own, and children she cannot take with her. The book was published in 1938 and it is still the sharpest thing in his work about what a marriage costs a woman with no money.

Raman paints shop boards in Malgudi, thinks of himself as a man of reason, and is quite pleased with that idea until Daisy arrives. She travels the district for the family planning programme, argues with village elders about birth control, and has no interest in marriage, children, or Raman's plans for her. He follows her around the countryside on a bullock cart pretending it is about lettering. Narayan wrote it while India's population campaign was at its most forceful, and the book keeps that pressure in the background of what is otherwise a comedy about a man out of his depth.

Sriram lives off his grandmother's savings and has no plans until he sees Bharati collecting donations for Gandhi. He follows her into the movement with motives nobody in the book pretends are political, and finds himself painting slogans, hiding out, and eventually in jail while the country changes around him. Gandhi appears in person, speaks, and is written with more caution than Narayan usually allows himself. The story runs to the end of the freedom struggle and stops on the day everybody knows is coming.

Narayan takes the Ramayana, works mainly from Kamban's Tamil telling rather than the Sanskrit, and compresses it into a book you can finish over a weekend. He keeps the narrative moving, cuts the theology to a minimum, and treats the characters as characters, so Kaikeyi has motives you can follow and Ravana is a person rather than a set of horns. It reads like a novelist retelling a story he has known since childhood, which is exactly what it is. He did the same job for the Mahabharata six years later.