15 Books Like Chetan Bhagat, With Endings That Actually Land

Zoya was born in Delhi at the exact moment India lifted the 1983 World Cup, which is a fact her family has milked for years. Then the national team eats breakfast with her, wins, and decides she is a good luck charm worth flying to every match. Nikhil Khoda, the captain, thinks the whole thing is superstitious nonsense and says so. Chauhan writes Punjabi family dialogue better than anyone alive, and the advertising world is drawn from the inside, since that was her actual job.

Ankita is the sort of student everybody's parents hold up as an example: grades, friends, a scholarship, plans. The book follows her through college in the 1990s and into an illness she has no vocabulary for, then into treatment, then into the long unglamorous business of building a life on the other side. Shenoy writes without any drama in the sentences, which is the right choice, and the sections about how family and friends behave around a mental health diagnosis are the truest part.

Raghu writes everything down. He is fifteen, he lives in Delhi, his family is strained in ways he does not fully see yet, and he has decided that Brahmi is the point of his life. The diary form lets Datta write teenage feeling at full volume without apologising for it, and the book goes to places most Indian commercial fiction avoids, including self-harm and a household that does not know how to help. It is the book of his I would hand to someone who has only seen his covers and dismissed him.

Ravin is an IT engineer in Bangalore, bored, single, and eventually persuaded to create a matrimonial profile. He meets Khushi, and the courtship happens the way courtships happened in 2006: long phone calls, careful family conversations, a single meeting in a city neither of them lives in. It is written simply and without much technique, and then it stops being a love story, because the events were real and Singh is writing about something that happened to him.

Tejas needs to get to Chennai. His professor needs him to stay in Delhi. What follows is a comic chase across the country involving forged plans, an unreliable friend, a train, and a level of self-belief only a twenty year old could sustain. The book came out of the same Srishti-era boom that produced most of this genre, and it is by some distance the funniest thing that boom produced. The romance is thin, the running around is the point.

Shiva leads his tribe into Meluha, a society organised down to the last detail, where the ruling class is waiting for a saviour from the mountains. His throat turns blue after a drink of somras, which is the sign they have been promised, and a man who considers himself an ordinary fighter has to decide whether to accept a role written for him. Amish treats the gods as people with logistics problems, which is the whole appeal, and the writing is quick and unfussy.

You know the story. What you have probably never had is the woman at the centre of it narrating her own marriage, her own humiliation in the court, and her own unspoken feeling for the man on the other side. Divakaruni keeps the plot familiar and moves the camera, so the war becomes something that happens to a household rather than to a nation. It reads faster than any other retelling I have tried, and the palace of the title is the saddest thing in it.

One thread follows the classical strategist plotting his way to control of a kingdom. The other follows Gangasagar Mishra, a modern Brahmin schoolteacher in Kanpur who picks a slum girl and spends decades manoeuvring her towards the prime minister's chair. The two timelines mirror each other move for move, and the pleasure is watching a plan work in two centuries at once. Sanghi is not a beautiful writer and does not try to be. He is an excellent plotter.

Rivanah moves from Kolkata to Mumbai for a job, takes a flat, and begins receiving instructions from an anonymous stranger who knows what she did yesterday and what she is about to do tomorrow. Sometimes the stranger helps her. That is the unsettling part. Chakraborty writes short chapters that end on a hook, which makes the book move at speed, and the Mumbai of paying guest accommodation and office politics is convincingly ordinary underneath the creepiness.

Gopal arrives from a town in India to study chemistry in America, armed with letters from his father and no preparation at all for roommates, dating, or the plumbing. The comedy comes from his letters home, which describe American life with total confidence and consistent inaccuracy. It was written before the current wave of Indian commercial fiction existed, and it is still funnier than most of what came after, though a few of the jokes have aged into things you would not write now.

Ram Mohammad Thomas is eighteen, works in a bar in Mumbai, and has just answered twelve questions correctly on national television. Nobody believes he could have. Each chapter takes one question and gives you the piece of his life that taught him the answer, so the book is really twelve short stories about the underside of the city, stacked into a structure that keeps you moving. It became the film Slumdog Millionaire, which changed several things and lost the book's cold humour.

Balram Halwai narrates his own rise in seven nights of letters, from a tea shop in a village to a car in Delhi to an office in Bangalore, and he tells you early what he did to get there. Adiga writes servitude from the inside: the mosquito net over the driver's mat, the way employers talk over your head, the arithmetic of a family that owns your future. It is very funny in a way that keeps turning cold on you, and it moves like a thriller.

Ayyan Mani works for a famous Brahmin astronomer and spends his days watching brilliant men behave like children. He lives in a one room chawl with his wife and his partially deaf son, and he begins, almost as a joke, to build a public legend around the boy. The plot then does what good plots do and stops being a joke. Joseph writes the funniest sentences of anyone on this list, and the caste politics are handled with no lecturing at all.

Em is the mother. The Big Hoom is the father. The narrator is their son, growing up in a small Mahim flat where his mother's mental illness is not a secret and not a story, simply the condition of the household. The book is short and made of scenes and remembered conversation, and Em gets all the best lines, which is exactly how it goes in families like this. It is the most honest Indian book I know about loving someone who is ill.

Mano Majra is small enough that everyone knows the train timings and everyone knows everyone's business. Then Partition reaches it, in the form of rumours, then officials, then a train from across the new border with nobody alive on it. Singh writes it as a village story, with a local dacoit, a Muslim girl, a nervous bureaucrat and a communist who has read too much, and the horror arrives through ordinary people making ordinary decisions slightly too late.