The 10 Best Ravinder Singh Books, Ranked by How Real They Feel

Ravin, an engineer in Bhubaneswar, gets pushed by his friends onto a matrimonial website, where he finds a woman working in Delhi. They talk on the phone for months before they ever meet, in the way Indian couples of that era genuinely did, and the courtship is all logistics and long calls and families being told. Then, days before the engagement, an accident. The last third is a man writing down the worst thing that ever happened to him with no craft to hide behind, and the absence of craft is exactly what makes it land.

Singh grew up in Burla in western Odisha, and this is the book where he goes back for it: classroom rituals, the terror of exam results, the games, the first flicker of interest in a girl who did not notice, the specific texture of being a boy in a small Indian town in the nineties. There is no plot to speak of. It is a sequence of remembered things, and because he is remembering rather than inventing, the writing loosens up and becomes properly likeable for the only time in his catalogue.

Rupali arrives at Delhi University from a small town with her books and her plans intact. Arjun is already there, deep in student politics, the sort of confident boy who runs things and knows it. The romance is the surface. Underneath, Singh is writing about how campus power actually operates in North India, and about the safety of women on and around a university, which was very much the national argument in 2014. This book has more on its mind than anything else he has published.

Ravin has moved abroad to get away from the memory, and in Belgium he meets Simar, who works at the Indian embassy and is the opposite of quiet grief. The book is framed as a story being told to friends, and the question in the title is asked seriously: can a person who has already had the great love of his life have another one. Singh clearly wanted to answer it honestly. Whether the ending actually does that is the argument every reader of this book eventually has with somebody.

Lavanya lives loosely and Rajveer runs his life by rules, and Singh does the standard opposites-attract setup competently for most of the first half. Then a crash arrives and the book changes job. The back half is about what happens on Indian roads and how casually this country treats the subject. It is the most openly issue-driven thing he has written outside Your Dreams Are Mine Now, and for the last hundred pages the message and the story are pulling in different directions.

Naina is married, well settled and quietly unhappy inside a life that looks entirely correct from outside. Aarav is a fitness trainer carrying none of those obligations. The book is about the pull between what a woman is permitted and what she wants, and to Singh's credit he does not treat her as a villain for wanting it. It is also by some distance his most physically written novel, which caught out a lot of readers who came to him from the grief books.

Abhimanyu writes the kind of books that sell in airports and is not remotely humble about it. Asmita edits literary fiction at the same publishing house and considers his work beneath the imprint. They clash, he sets out to prove a point at her expense, and the enemies-to-lovers machine handles the rest. The interesting part is the setting: this is Singh writing about Indian publishing, snobbery toward popular fiction, and more or less the exact criticism he has been taking for fifteen years.

Happy, MP, Raamji and Ravin graduated together, got married, got jobs, and then worked out that not one of them ever had a bachelor party. So they plan one, extremely late, and go to Europe. It is a comedy about middle-aged Indian men behaving like hostel students for a fortnight, and it works best in the stretches where it stops trying to be a novel and simply lets four friends be irritating to each other in a shared room. There is a sentimental turn near the end that the book did not need.

This is an anthology of short pieces submitted by readers and selected by Singh, not a book he wrote himself. The stories are uneven by design, some barely run three pages, and the quality swings from genuinely affecting to school magazine. What makes it worth the shelf space is that it is the clearest statement of what he actually believes: that ordinary people's love stories deserve printing, and that you do not need a writing degree to have had something happen to you.

Three years after the first collection, Singh ran the same idea with the brief widened out. These are not all love stories, they are moments people could not forget: family, loss, luck, small kindnesses, ordinary turning points. The widening helps in places, because the writers are no longer straining to make everything romantic, and it hurts in others, because a few of the pieces have no shape at all. Again, other people wrote these. He chose them and wrote the introduction.