International Authors Book Club

Read an author of your choosing from a predetermined country. September’s nation is India. We will meet each third Thursday of the month to discuss your author, their works, and any themes they explore.

To get you started, check out our list of a few literary award-winning authors originally from India.

The bolded titles are available through your Santa Fe Public Library as books or ebooks (Hoopla or Overdrive/Libby).

For disability accommodations, please contact a Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

Suggested authors:

Mulk Raj Anand, author of Across Black Waters, Coolie, The Sword and the Sickle and Untouchable

The 1953 International Peace Prize honoree was recognized for his depiction of the lives of the poorer class in the traditional Indian society, including Untouchable (1935). He along with R.K. Narayan was one of the first India-based writers in the English language to gain an international readership.

Aravind Adiga, author of Amnesty, Between the Assassinations (short stories), Last Man in a Tower, Selection Day and White Tiger

Adiga won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for fiction for his debut novel, White Tiger, which is also available in Large Print. It concerns Balram Halwai: Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Balram tells the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along.

Shastri Akella, author of The Sea Elephants

This queer coming-of-age novel is set in 1990s India. After the sudden deaths of his beloved twin sisters, Shagun flees his own guilt, his mother's grief, and his father's violent disapproval by enrolling at an all-boys boarding school. But he doesn't find true belonging until he encounters a traveling theater troupe performing the Hindu myths of his childhood.

Indra Das, author of The Devourers

In The Devourers, Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. The tale features a rough wanderer in 17th-century Mughal India who finds himself irrevocably drawn to a defiant woman -- and destined to be torn asunder by two clashing worlds. With every passing chapter of beauty and brutality, Alok's interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent.

Anita Desai, author of The Artist of Disappearances: Three Novellas; Clear Light of Day, Cry, The Desert, Fasting, Feasting; Fire on the Mountain, The Museum of Final Journeys, Rosarita, Translator Translated, and The Zigzag Way

Her novels and novellas typically offer a nuanced portrayal of the lives of women in India. 

Amitav Ghosh, author of The Glass Palace, Gun Island, Sea of Poppies, The Shadow Lines, The Hungry Tide and the Ibis Trilogy

Ghosh won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honor. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia.

Manu Joseph, author of The Illicit Happiness of Other People, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous and Serious Men, winner of the 2010 Hindu Literary Prize and 2011 PEN Open Book Award

In The Illicit Happiness of Other People, Unni, 17, has done something terrible. The only clue to his actions lies in a comic strip he has drawn, which has fallen into the hands of his father Ousep - a nocturnal anarchist with a wife who is fantasizing about his early death. Ousep begins investigating the extraordinary life of his son and unravels a secret that shakes his family to the core.

Serious Men follows Ayyan Mani, who works as an assistant to a Brahmin astronomer at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai. He lives in a slum with his wife and son. Furious at his situation, Ayyan develops an outrageous story that his 10-year-old son is a mathematical genius – a lie which soon gets out of control

Meena Kandasamy, author of The Book of Desire, The Gypsy Goddess, and When I Hit You: Or, a-Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

Set in modern India, the narrator falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife. Based on the author's own experience of marriage, soon the newlywed suffers from extreme violence at her husband's hands and finds herself socially isolated.

Sacina Kuṇḍalakara, author of Cobalt Blue and Nineteen Ninety

Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with the same man, an artist lodging in their family home in Pune. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mother's musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But he also has no last name, no family, no friends, no history, and no plans.

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies, The Lowland, The Namesake, and Unaccustomed Earth

Lahiri's characters are often first-generation immigrants who must navigate between the cultural values of their homeland and their adopted home. Lahiri's fiction is mostly autobiographical, drawing upon her experiences as well as those of her parents, friends, and acquaintances. In Unaccustomed Earth, she focuses on the second and third generation immigrants. 

R.K. Narayan, author of The Guide, Malgudi Days, The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic and The Painter of Signs

Known for his novels set in the fictional town of Malgudi, Narayan's 30-plus novels offer varied, insightful perspectives on Indian life and culture. 

Anuradha Roy, author of Sleeping on Jupiter, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, The Folded Earth, All the Lives We Never Lived and The Earthspinner

The multiple-award winner is best known for All the Lives We Never Lived, a work of World War II historical fiction dealing with identity, love and a women’s role in India; Sleeping on Jupiter, for which she won the 2016 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; and more recently, The Earthspinner, about the transformative passions of art creation, forbidden love, unrequited love, and adopting a rescue dog.

Arundhati Roy, author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, The God of Small Things and numerous political commentaries

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness begins with Anjum -- who used to be Aftab -- unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. We encounter the odd Tilo and the men who love her -- their fates entwined as their arms always will be.

In 1969 in Kerala, India, Rahel and her twin brother, Estha, struggle to forge a childhood amid the destruction of their family life in The God of Small Things, which won the 1997 Man Booker Prize.

Salman Rushdie, author of East, West (short stories), The Enchantress of Florence, Fury, The Golden House, Grimus, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Luka and the Fire of Life, Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, Quichotte, The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown, Shame, Two years eight months and twenty-eight nights, Victory City and works of nonfiction including The Jaguar Smile, Joseph Anton: A Memoir and Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

This prominent literary figure, sadly, may be best known for the fatwa calling for his death for writing The Satanic Verses. His widely acclaimed works often explore themes of identity, history, and the complexities of multiculturalism. 

Viveka Sanabhaga, author of Ghachar Ghocar

For readers of Akhil Sharma, a haunting novel about an upwardly mobile family splintered by success in rapidly changing India. "It's true what they say -- it's not we who control money, it's the money that controls us." 

Vikram Seth, author of An Equal Music, The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse and A Suitable Boy

Seth's work often explores the complexities of Indian society and culture. 

Akhil Sharma, author of Cosmopolitan, Family Life, A Life of Adventure and Delight and An Obedient Father

His first novel, An Obedient Father, won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

His second novel, the semi-autobiographical Family Life, won the 2015 Folio Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award 2016.

Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, author of The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories (ebook), The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey and My Father's Garden

In this collection of stories, set in the mineral-rich hinterland and the ever-expanding, squalid towns of Jharkhand, Shekhar breathes life into a set of characters who are as robustly flesh and blood as the soil, from which they spring, where they live, and into which they must sometimes bleed.

Khushwant Singh, author of The Company of Women, Delhi and Train to Pakistan (ebook)

A writer and novelist known for his work focusing on Indian literature and politics. Train to Pakistan recounts the Partition of India in August 1947 through the perspective of Mano Majra, a fictional border village.

Jeet Thayil, author of Narcopolis

A tale of vice and passion set against a backdrop of late 1970s Bombay finds a New Yorker becoming entranced with the underworld culture of an opium den and brothel where he encounters a pipe-making eunuch, a violent businessman, and a Chinese refugee.

Madhuri Vijay, author of The Far Field, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013 and The Best American Short Stories 2021

The Hawaii resident’s debut focuses on Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, who sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. She is certain that the recent death of her mother is connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home. The novel won the JCB Prize for literature, India's most prestigious literary award, and the 2019 Pushcart Prize.