15 South Asian Diaspora Novels, By Who Does the Leaving

Nazneen arrives in Tower Hamlets from a village in Bangladesh, married to a much older man who talks a great deal about respect and reads a great deal of nothing. For years her world is the flat, the estate and letters from the sister who stayed behind. Then she takes in sewing, and a machine and her own money change what is possible. Ali is very good on Chanu, the husband, who is a fool and a snob and also a man being slowly ground down by a country that will not employ him properly. The novel is long and takes its time, in the way the years it covers took their time.

Ajay is eight when the family lands in America and everything is thrilling, including the carpet. Then his brilliant older brother dives into a pool, hits his head, and survives with catastrophic brain damage. The rest of the novel is the family living around that bed for years: the mother's faith, the father's drinking, the visitors who come to touch the boy for blessings, and Ajay growing up as the one who is fine and therefore invisible. Sharma writes in short flat sentences that never once reach for your pity, which is precisely why it lands as hard as it does.

Jyoti is widowed at seventeen in a village in Punjab, travels to the United States on false papers to carry out a plan she never completes, and instead keeps becoming somebody else. Jasmine, then Jase, then Jane, each name attached to a different man and a different state. Mukherjee wrote it in 1989 and it still reads fast and hot, with a narrator who is neither a victim nor a saint. It is also, deliberately, a novel about wanting America rather than mourning India, which was an unusual position to take then and is an unusual one now.

Two lovers go missing. Everybody in the neighbourhood, which its residents have renamed after the towns they came from, knows roughly what happened and why, and the novel spends a year inside the family of the missing man's brother as the truth moves closer. Aslam took more than a decade over this book and the prose shows every year of it, loaded with moths, snow, paint and birds. It is the most beautiful writing on this list and also the angriest, because what the book argues is that a community can carry its own prison across an ocean and set it up again on a wet English street.

Arjun Mehta is recruited in Delhi with a lot of talk about opportunity, lands in California, and discovers he is contract labour on a visa that effectively owns him. When the layoff comes he does something stupid and enormous: he writes a virus, names it after the film star he adores, and networks around the world start falling over. Kunzru cuts between Arjun, a British marketing man and a Bollywood actress, and the satire is aimed at the entire machine that shifts people and money around the planet. Funny for a long stretch, and then suddenly not funny at all.

Ashoke and Ashima marry in Kolkata and move to Massachusetts, and their son is registered as Gogol because the hospital needs a name that day and the letter from India carrying the real one has not arrived. The novel follows Gogol from that hospital to college, through relationships that are partly about escaping the name, to the day he finally understands what it meant to his father. Lahiri writes ordinary life with such accuracy that a scene at a dinner party ends up carrying the weight of a country. Very little happens dramatically, and that is exactly the design.

Archie and Samad met in a tank at the end of the second world war and wash up in North London decades later, one married to a Jamaican woman half his age, the other to a Bangladeshi woman with more sense than either of them. Their children then refuse every plan the fathers make. Smith writes crowds, jokes, arguments and voices, and the book is loud the way a Willesden bus is loud. Underneath the comedy it is about what fathers do when they realise their children belong to a country the fathers cannot read.

Karim's father, an Indian clerk in a London borough, reinvents himself as a spiritual teacher for bored suburban English people, which works alarmingly well. Karim uses the resulting chaos to get out: theatre, sex, the seventies, a city where punk is starting and race is a daily negotiation nobody has agreed the terms of. Kureishi is funny and completely unsentimental about identity, including the way Karim performs Indianness on stage because that is the only role anyone is offering him. It has aged in places and it is still the freest book here.

Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz are the children of a jihadi father who died on his way to Guantanamo, a fact the British state has never allowed them to put down. When Parvaiz goes to Syria, the family collides with the ambitions of a British home secretary of Pakistani origin who has built an entire career on distance from people like them. Shamsie takes Sophocles and fits him to the war on terror with almost no strain showing. The last thirty pages move very fast and are extremely hard to read calmly.

The novel opens at Hadia's wedding, where her estranged brother Amar turns up after years away, and then it travels backwards through the childhoods that produced that silence. Mirza writes a devout family without mocking the faith and without selling it either: prayer, the mosque, the rules the daughters get and the sons do not, and a father whose love keeps arriving in the wrong language. The final section switches into the father's voice and is the best thing in the book by some margin. She wrote it in her twenties, which is frankly annoying.

Neil is a lazy teenager in a suburb of Atlanta where every other Indian kid is being engineered into a success story. His neighbour Anita and her mother have found a shortcut: a brew made from stolen gold that transfers the striving of its owner to whoever drinks it down. Sathian uses that one absurd idea to take apart model-minority pressure, the entrance-exam industry and the gold-rush history of the American west, and she is funny the whole way. The second half jumps forward into adulthood and loses some of the first half's charge.

Changez is a Princeton graduate working at a New York valuation firm, very good at it, in love with a woman who is not well, and then the towers come down and he watches the city start looking at him differently. He also catches himself smiling at the news in a way that frightens him. The whole novel is a monologue delivered to a silent American across a table in Lahore, and Hamid never tells you what the listener is or what happens when the meal ends. It runs under two hundred pages and can be finished in an evening.

Two stories run against each other. An anglophile judge sits in a damp house in the Himalayan foothills as the Gorkhaland agitation of the mid-1980s reaches his gate, while Biju, the cook's son, moves between basement kitchens in Manhattan with no papers and no way home. Desai is merciless about the fantasy of the west, and equally merciless about the class arrangement back home that makes the fantasy necessary in the first place. The Kalimpong sections are the strongest writing. The New York sections are the ones you will still be thinking about at two in the morning.

Saeed and Nadia meet at an evening class in an unnamed city, fall into something, and then the war arrives street by street. Instead of a harrowing crossing, Hamid gives them doors: black rectangles that open onto Mykonos, London, California. Removing the journey leaves the actual subject exposed, which is what happens to two people afterwards, and what happens to the places receiving them. The prose is calm and formal, almost fable-like, and a running series of one-page glimpses shows other doors opening elsewhere in the world at the same time.

Mahindan arrives in British Columbia with his six-year-old son on a rusted freighter and is detained immediately while Canada works out whether he was a victim of the Sri Lankan civil war or a participant in it. Bala tells it from three sides: the detained father, a young lawyer carrying her own family history, and an adjudicator whose Japanese Canadian grandparents were interned in the 1940s. The novel was built on a real arrival by sea in 2010, and it stays close to the procedure, the hearings, the paperwork, the delays, which is exactly where the cruelty lives.