12 Books Like A Suitable Boy: Long Indian Novels Worth a Month

A widow taking in tailoring work to stay independent, two tailors who left their village because their caste made staying impossible, and a student whose parents sent him to the city for a better life. They end up in one small flat while the Emergency tightens outside it. Mistry writes plainly, almost transparently, and he is very funny in the early stretches, which is precisely what makes the rest land the way it does. The city is never named and everybody who has lived in Bombay knows exactly which city it is.

The Ibis is being fitted out to carry indentured labour across the sea, and Ghosh assembles her passengers from every corner of the opium economy: a Bihari peasant whose fields grow poppy instead of food, a widow escaping her husband's pyre, a mixed-race sailor passing as white, a zamindar ruined by an English trading house. The famous thing about the book is the language, a swirl of lascar sailor talk, Bhojpuri and Anglo-Indian slang. Give it forty pages. Your ear adjusts, and then it becomes the most purely enjoyable Indian novel of the last twenty years.

Saleem Sinai narrates his own life to a woman in a pickle factory, and his life keeps turning out to be the nation's life in a bad wig: Partition, the wars, the Emergency, all of it happening to his body. The telling is loud, digressive and full of jokes, and Saleem is unreliable in ways he cheerfully admits. This is the book that made Indian writing in English sound like Indian speech rather than a British import, and every novelist on this list working after 1981 is standing in the space it opened.

Sartaj Singh, a middling Sikh inspector with a failed marriage, gets a tip about a bunker in the suburbs where the gangster Ganesh Gaitonde has sealed himself in. From there the book alternates: Sartaj working the case in the present, Gaitonde narrating his rise from nothing. Around the two of them Chandra builds the whole apparatus, film financiers, intelligence officers, small-time informers, mothers, until the crime plot is nearly the least interesting thing in it. The Netflix series took the frame and threw most of the book away, so having watched it costs you nothing.

The frame is a shabby present-day narrator, a journalist who has spent his life on the fringes of Delhi society, and Bhagmati, the hijra he keeps returning to. Between their chapters Singh drops into the city's past and lets it speak in the first person: a poet, a Mughal, a sweeper, an invader, a builder of tombs. The historical chapters are brisk and frequently filthy, and the book ends in 1984 in a way that is very hard to read calmly. Singh was seventy-five when it came out and clearly past caring who he offended.

Nariman Vakeel breaks an ankle and can no longer manage alone, so he lands in his daughter Roxana's two-room flat in Bombay, where there is no room and less money. Mistry then does the thing he does better than anyone: watching decent people get ground down by an arithmetic they cannot solve. There is a marriage in the background that explains Nariman's entire life, revealed slowly and painfully. It is smaller than A Fine Balance and far less punishing, and it is the best novel I know about what looking after a parent actually costs the people doing it.

The conceit is simple and the execution is not. The epic's characters become the figures of twentieth century Indian politics, and the eighteen books of the Mahabharata become eighteen books about the freedom struggle, Partition and the Emergency, all of it dictated by Ved Vyas to a reluctant secretary. Tharoor is showing off on every page, and whether that delights or annoys you will decide how you feel about the whole enterprise. The satire is sharpest on the generation that inherited the republic rather than the one that won it.

Estha and Rahel are seven years old when something happens by the river in Ayemenem that scatters their family across two decades and two continents. Roy tells it out of order, circling the event, so you know the outcome long before you know the cause and the dread builds anyway. The prose invents words, repeats phrases like refrains, and sees everything through a child's grammar. That style is the whole argument about this book. Some readers find it the most alive writing in Indian English. Others are exhausted by page fifty.

Ma has lost her husband and taken to her bed with her back to the room. Her family manage her decline with the usual mixture of concern and irritation, and then she rises, moves in with her daughter, makes a friend nobody approves of, and sets off towards the Pakistan border. Shree writes with doors, crows and the border itself as speaking characters, and Daisy Rockwell's translation keeps the wordplay of the Hindi instead of smoothing it into standard English. The first hundred pages are a wall. Cross it and the last third is extraordinary.

Divakaruni hands the epic to the woman at the centre of it and lets her narrate from her birth to the end of the war. Draupadi here is proud, sharp and often wrong, and the book is most alive when it stays with her irritations: five husbands sharing her by rota, a mother-in-law running the household, a lifelong pull towards Karna that she never acts on. The prose is straightforward and the pace is quick. Purists will object to the liberties taken. Readers who have never got through the epic will finish this one.

An unnamed narrator moves between Calcutta, Dhaka and London, and between the 1960s and his own present, piecing together what happened to his cousin Tridib. Ghosh gives you the pieces out of order and expects you to hold them, and the payoff is a chapter near the end where a riot in two cities on opposite sides of a border becomes one single event. The novel's argument is that the lines drawn in 1947 created the very fear they claimed to prevent. It is 264 pages and it will take you as long as a 500-page book.

Tara comes back to the family house in Old Delhi with her diplomat husband, and her sister Bim has stayed in it her whole life, teaching, looking after their brother, letting the garden go. The novel moves backwards through the family's history to the summer of 1947, when the house emptied out and Bim's life quietly closed around her. Desai works almost entirely in atmosphere, heat, dust, a dog, a well, and the resentments come out sideways inside ordinary conversation. It is the most old-fashioned novel here and the most exact about how siblings wound each other.