Durjoy Datta Books Ranked: The 15 That Matter, Best First

Raghu keeps a diary of the things he thinks about doing to people, which is not a sentence you expect in a Durjoy Datta novel. Then he meets Brahmi, and the book becomes something rarer than a romance: two damaged teenagers trying to keep each other alive through school, parents and the kind of adult help that arrives late. The writing is plainer than in the early books, fewer jokes, longer silences. It is the first half of a two part story and it stops on a roof, mid breath, which is either brave or unfair depending on your mood.

This is the book where he stopped writing about college and started writing about mortality. Two patients share a floor in a Delhi hospital, one holding on with everything available and one who has already given up, and around them are doctors young enough to still take it personally. It moves fast, the sentences stay simple, and it does not pretend medicine is tidy. I read it on a train and had to look out of the window twice, which is the highest compliment I give any book with a hospital in it.

The publisher copy tells you exactly where this one opens: two years after Raghu left Brahmi on the edge of a roof. What follows is a novel about what recovery actually looks like, which is slow, unheroic and full of relapses the story refuses to punish. It runs warmer than part one, it is funnier in places, and it allows a few people to be kind without a twist attached. Read it straight after The Boy Who Loved. On its own it feels like walking into a room where everybody has already been crying.

Dhruv and Aranya were children together and it went badly, in the way only children manage. Years later they are on the same engineering campus and the grudge is fully grown. This is his best enemies to lovers book, and it works because the cruelty is written honestly: Dhruv is not a misunderstood hero, he is frequently just mean, and the novel knows it. Aranya is the more interesting half, an ambitious girl who has been told since childhood that she is not pretty enough to be taken seriously. The romance is a fight the whole way through.

A musician on the way down meets a girl on the way up, and the novel is mostly about the distance between how a person sees himself and how one other person insists on seeing him. It is the sweetest of his mid period books and the least complicated. Nothing here will surprise a regular romance reader, but the pacing is confident, and there is a stretch in the middle about ambition and failure that is better than the plot surrounding it. Short chapters, low friction, the sort of book you finish across two evenings without noticing.

This is a novel about the after, not about the breakup. The question the publisher prints on the back is whether you can find yourself once you have lost the person who was holding your definition of you, and the book takes that seriously for its two hundred and forty pages. There is a lot of ordinary daily work in it, which is a strange and welcome thing in an Indian romance. The prose is the cleanest of his career. What it lacks is the pull of the darker books, so the middle third drifts.

Deb comes out of the Chandni Chowk blasts alive and holding a diary that is not his. The rest is a road trip to find the people in it, told in two threads that keep handing the story back and forth. It is co written with Nikita Singh and you can feel two writers pulling, sometimes usefully. The premise is the best he has ever had, the kind of hook most Indian commercial fiction of that decade never attempted. The execution is patchy, especially in the last quarter, where a good mystery resolves into a neat one.

This one returns to a narrator called Deb and finds him deep in the part nobody writes about, the years after the girl says yes. Careers pull towards different cities. Families have opinions and share them. The romance is not in danger from a villain, it is in danger from logistics, which is the most honest thing in the book. At nearly four hundred pages it runs longer than the material wants, and the middle sags badly, but the last fifty pages contain the most adult writing in his catalogue.

Told from both sides, this one puts a relationship in front of you that most of the people surrounding the characters would refuse to accept, then makes you sit with the two of them being ordinary and fond of each other. Durjoy is good at that trick, normalising the thing first and letting the outrage arrive later. Where it slips is length and repetition, the same argument circling back three times with new furniture. The two voices stay distinct enough that you always know who is speaking, which is not a given in dual narration.

The cover carries the line Enter the Valley of the Gods, and the setting does most of the heavy lifting: a Himalayan valley, weather with plans of its own, two people who did not want to be anywhere near each other. The publisher describes the trouble as a disaster and love as the only thing that can save them, which gives you the shape without spoiling the turns. It is his most cinematic book, three hundred and fifty odd pages that move like a screenplay. The characters are thinner than in his dark run, the pace is better.

A girl starts college, finds a group, and the group turns out to be the actual love story. There is a romance, with a senior called Karthik whose anger is a lid on an older wound, but the parts that stayed with me are the friendship scenes: hostel rooms, cheap food, the very specific loneliness of your first month away from home. It is co written with Nikita Singh, and her hand shows in the narrator's voice, which is the most convincing female narration in his early work. Slight, warm, over quickly.

Two hundred pages, one straightforward premise, a couple who are happy until her ex reappears and the book stops being simple. The publisher promises a surprise ending, there is one, and I will let you decide whether it works. This is Durjoy in efficiency mode: short chapters, clear stakes, no ambition beyond keeping you entertained between two metro stops. It is the least serious book of his Penguin years and it never pretends otherwise, which I respect more than I respect the books that pretend.

This is where it started, in 2008, self consciously crude, written by a very young man about very young men, carrying the sentence rhythm of a hostel conversation at two in the morning. Deb narrates, he is in love with Avantika, and he sabotages it in ways meant to be funny that sometimes are. The prose is rough in a way that dates it, though the dialogue still moves. Read now it works best as a period piece about a specific Delhi moment, Orkut adjacent, before Indian commercial fiction learned any manners.

The title is the entire plot and the entire personality. A boy in one city, a girl in another, one mistake, and then a couple of hundred pages of a young man arguing with himself about whether it counts. What saves it from being unbearable is that the book does not fully let him off, and there are three or four pages near the end sharper than anything else in his Srishti years. What sinks it is the rest: filler scenes, jokes that have aged into evidence, and a plot that repeats a beat because nothing stops it.

Four friends walk out of college at twenty one and into jobs paying more than their parents earn, and the book asks what that does to people who were close when they were all broke. There is a good novel hiding in that idea, about the first Indian generation to get paid early and heavily, and it surfaces maybe four times. Around it sits a lot of noise: crowded plotting, characters who behave like different people by chapter, jokes doing work that scenes should be doing. The premise remains the best thing about it.