The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

Indian Subcontinent

Since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s (b. 1947) Midnight’s Children (1981), English-language fiction by writers from the Indian subcontinent has enjoyed increasing popularity, but even before then, several authors from the region had become established internationally. Though the relatively widespread use of the colonial language has facilitated access to the wider markets, the first great twentieth-century authors from what was then British-ruled India did not write primarily in English. Bengali author and 1913 Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) did translate some of his own work into English and was best known for his poetry, but he was also a very fine writer of fiction. Hindustani author Premchand (1880–1936) wrote fiction in both Urdu and Hindi. He remains the prime chronicler of ordinary and village life in the India of his time, and the stories by the prolific Urdu-writing Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955) deservedly enjoy continued popularity.

The Forerunners

R. K. Narayan (1906–2001) is best known for his novels and stories set in the fictional Malgudi, a town in southern India. Written over half a century, beginning with Swami and Friends (1935), each of these works centers on different characters from all walks of life and their everyday fates in this typical Indian town, with relatively little attention to the greater social and political upheavals taking place in India during this period. One of the novels, A Tiger for Malgudi (1983) is even narrated by a tiger, now languishing in a zoo. Unassuming, often gently comic, Narayan’s works contrast with much of the flashier fiction of the Rushdie age but are worth revisiting for their charming studies of Indian life. The Guide (1958), in which a con artist is mistaken for a holy man after his release from prison but then grows into the role, is the most memorable of Narayan’s Malgudi works, but almost all his books are worth reading.

Whereas Narayan spent almost his entire life in India, Raja Rao (1908–2006) lived abroad for much of his, and his longest novels, the autobiographical The Serpent and the Rope (1960) and The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988), alternate between India and the West. More closely grounded in India, Kanthapura (1938) describes the spread to a southern Indian town of Gandhian nonviolent opposition to the British, while The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) is a sort of metaphysical counterpart to The Serpent and the Rope in which Rao shows a much lighter touch. Rao integrates Indian philosophy and myth, as well as literary traditions, into his novels, but what is still background in a largely social realist novel like Kanthapura becomes central in his later works, taking on a philosophical density that particularly weighs down The Chessmaster and His Moves. The more playful The Cat and Shakespeare offers the most approachable mix, but all of Rao’s works—even his sketchy take on Communism, Comrade Kirillov (first published in French, 1965; English 1976)—are worthwhile.

• G. V. Desani’s (1909–2000) irrepressible comic bildungsroman is called All About H. Hatterr (1948).

The First Wave of Women Writers

A number of female Indian authors writing in English became established after independence, beginning with Kamala Markandaya (1924–2004). Nectar in a Sieve (1954) is the first of many of her realist works in which modernization and the continually encroaching Western ways, especially of capitalism, upend traditional lifestyles. English characters often figure prominently in her fiction, as the postcolonial readjustment of the relationship between the English and Indians moves forward only haltingly and is a continuing source of friction. Despite the books’ old-fashioned feel, they well describe the permutations of Anglo-Indian relationships.

Much of Nayantara Sahgal’s (b. 1927) work is closely tied to historical specifics and contemporary events. A niece of the first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and a cousin of his daughter and also prime minister, Indira Gandhi, Sahgal writes about the Indian political elites with which she is familiar while maintaining a critical distance in insightful novels such as Storm in Chandigarh (1969), which revolves around the internal partition; A Situation in New Delhi (1977), about the redrawing of state lines within India itself; and Rich Like Us (1985), set during the state of emergency in the mid-1970s.

Anita Desai’s (b. 1937) fiction treats a much broader variety of foreign experiences, ranging from Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), the story of a Jewish expatriate who escaped the Nazis to live in India, to the entirely Mexican story of The Zigzag Way (2004). Desai is particularly adept with characters who are outsiders, such as the Europeans searching for spiritual fulfillment in exotic India in Journey to Ithaca (1995).

• Shashi Deshpande’s (b. 1938) southern Indian fiction focuses on the lives of women.

• German-born Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927–2013) may be best known for her work on numerous Merchant-Ivory films that has earned her two Academy Awards, but she also wrote several novels that consider the role of the foreigner in India, which include the Booker Prize–winning Heat and Dust (1975).

Midnight’s Children and Beyond

Despite the success of many Indian authors abroad, it was the publication of Salman Rushdie’s (b. 1947) Midnight’s Children (1981) that fundamentally changed Western attitudes toward English-language fiction from the region. Like many of the authors from India familiar to American and British audiences, Rushdie spent a significant amount of time abroad, being sent to England to complete his education when barely a teen and eventually settling there. The resulting familiarity with both Indian and Western cultures seems to have helped him and other Indian writers who followed a similar path; the lack of any comparable success abroad by Indian authors writing in a regional language is striking.

With its narrator born at the moment when India and Pakistan become independent in 1947, Midnight’s Children is, from the outset, presented as a national epic, though less a mirror than a kaleidoscopic refraction of modern India’s history. Rushdie’s subcontinental spin on magical realism, which includes giving supernatural powers to his protagonist and the one thousand others born in that first hour of independence, was enormously appealing, though, tellingly, considerably more so abroad than in India itself. A riveting story, Midnight’s Children is also a linguistic feast, with Rushdie showing a remarkable feel for language by enhancing his narrative with vocabulary and expressions from Urdu and other Indian languages.

Shame (1983), Rushdie’s denser and darker novel about Pakistan’s recent history and the role of shame in culture, is his most accomplished work, but with its close links to actual but less familiar figures and events, it is not as welcoming as Midnight’s Children. Meanwhile, even the memorable opening of The Satanic Verses (1988), describing two characters hurtling toward earth from nearly thirty thousand feet up after the explosion of the plane they were flying in, has been overshadowed by the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini (who, as “the Imam,” figures in the novel itself), sentencing Rushdie to death for blasphemy. The Satanic Verses follows the two characters who survived the plane’s explosion, with one taking on the form of an angel and the other the devil in just one of the novel’s magical-realist transformations. The controversial passages dealing with Islam are only one aspect of this very good book, whose themes include the immigrant experience and identity, but it has become almost impossible to read without also taking into account all this distracting extraliterary baggage.

Rushdie has continued to write larger-than-life works of fiction that use both distant and contemporary history and highlight cross-cultural encounters and conflicts, but the impact of much of his writing has worn off, and many of his linguistic tics and tricks and flourishes in his later books have come to feel gaudy and excessive. With novels such as Fury (2001) and Shalimar the Clown (2005), set largely or partially in the United States, Rushdie exposes a tin ear in regard to American culture, which also makes some of his foreign glitz and exotica suddenly look thinner, too. Much in these later works is often a smokeand-mirrors show rather than something substantial. Nevertheless, all his books contain at least some passages and often long stretches that do impress, with imaginative leaps that few other authors could handle.

Even though Midnight’s Children was pathbreaking, the best and best-known Indian authors writing in English fortunately did not choose to follow Rushdie’s model slavishly (though quite a few lesser authors did). Vikram Seth’s (b. 1952) mostly successful novel written in sonnets, The Golden Gate (1986), strikes out in a completely different direction, though it, too, may seem more a display of showmanship than a fully realized novel. Based entirely in California and borrowing more from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin than from any traditional Indian work, it is, at best, only remotely Indian. In contrast, Seth’s saga A Suitable Boy (1993) attempts to be comprehensively Indian. From the setting (the 1950s) to the subject (finding an appropriate husband for one of the characters) to the style, everything about this closely observed realist novel is a bit old-fashioned, but its attention to detail and intricately interwoven plotlines make for a rich picture of the India of that time. Its extreme length—at more than fifteen hundred pages, it claims to be the longest novel ever published in English in a single volume—can be daunting, but Seth manages to sustain interest for the duration. A Suitable Boy features a large cast of characters from four families, with the heart of the novel being the search for “a suitable boy” for Lata Mehra to marry. Seth reportedly is working on a sequel, A Suitable Girl, which jumps some sixty years ahead and in which Lata is now a grandmother, searching for a suitable girl for her grandson. This presumably will allow him to show the dramatic changes in Indian society over the past half century.

Amitav Ghosh’s (b. 1956) varied approaches and novelistic reach, extending throughout the subcontinent and to its edges, as well as to northern Africa and the United States, separates his work from that of other transnational Indian writers. His first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), embodies the restless ambition that has come to define his work. Its protagonist, Alu, is suspected of being a terrorist and is chased abroad, thereby allowing Ghosh to revel in all sorts of encounters and characters. As in many of his later books, even in a more straight-forward narrative such as his novel about Burma (now Myanmar), The Glass Palace (2000), Ghosh seems torn in different directions, giving in too often to his enthusiasms. Although the incidental occurrences are often well handled, the overall effect weakens the structure as a whole, and the novels feel too frail for all the author’s ambitions. The first in a trilogy, Sea of Poppies (2008), which begins just before the first of the British Opium Wars against China in 1839, is sturdier but still overloaded. Likewise, The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) combines the usual historical sweep of his novels with a few science fiction and thriller elements, but they do not all quite fit together.

Several of Vikram Chandra’s (b. 1961) works also tend toward epic sprawl. Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), a variation on the Arabian Nights, features stories within stories artfully mixing myth and history and Indian tradition and modernity. On an even larger scale, Sacred Games (2007) is a double character-study of the new India’s potential, framed as a mystery and thriller set in Mumbai. Pitting a policeman against one of the city’s most notorious criminals, the book delves into both their lives at great length. Chandra’s description of urban India’s recent rapid transformation and how people have adapted to it is arguably too comprehensive, and with its rather anticlimactic resolution, it is not entirely successful as a thriller but still is entertaining.

In his calm, reflective, and often domestic works like Freedom Song (1999) and A New World (2000), Amit Chaudhuri (b. 1962) does not need to resort to the spectacular, and instead of being action packed, his plots meander. With its meticulously controlled writing, Chaudhuri’s fiction is evocative, focusing on expression rather than invention.

Arundhati Roy’s (b. 1961) only novel to date is the colorful The God of Small Things (1997), which also belongs in the recent Indian tradition of wide-ranging, border-crossing—and overwritten—fiction. About a Syrian Christian family in the southern state of Kerala, it features fraternal twins Rahel and Estha. Burdened by their guilt over a death in which they were involved when they are children and the consequences of what happened in its wake, they were separated for many years and were reunited only as adults. The book is undeniably affecting, but Roy has a few too many tricks up her sleeves, and between the almost circular presentation of events and the occasional linguistic excesses, it too often feels forced.

Roy is among the very few Indian authors who did not study or live abroad for extended periods but who have achieved wider recognition in the West. Most of those whose background is entirely Indian have not fared as well, although Upamanyu Chatterjee (b. 1959) has deservedly found a small following. His laid-back civil service novel, English, August (1988), sends its protagonist to a small Indian town; it is a small satiric gem of a young man trying to find his place in the world. A broader, less focused sequel, The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), lacks the original’s more immediate appeal but still is an entertaining look at Indian governance. The Last Burden (1993) is a more somber Indian family tale.

• Aatish Taseer’s (b. 1980) novels Noon (2011) and The Way Things Were (2014) are ambitious novels about modern Pakistan and India.

• Tarun J. Tejpal’s (b. 1963) cleverly presented sweeping novel of contemporary India is The Story of My Assassins (2009).

• Manu Joseph’s (b. 1974) entertaining novels are Serious Men (2010) and The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012), offering insight into Indian society.

Other Indians Abroad

Many English-writing Indian authors living abroad continue to situate their fiction in their homeland. The universe of Manil Suri’s (b. 1959) The Death of Vishnu (2001) is almost entirely restricted to a small Mumbai apartment building whose landing has long been occupied by the dying Vishnu, an alcoholic who did some chores for the tenants. Suri describes everyday life and death, using both Hindu mythology—Vishnu becomes a stand-in for the namesake god—and contemporary mores and attitudes. In The Age of Shiva (2007), Suri creates a strong but flawed female protagonist, who lives through and is affected by the conflicts in India between the mid-1950s and Indira Gandhi’s term in office.

In Filming (2007), Tabish Khair (b. 1966) follows the rise of the Indian film industry in the twentieth century for a different perspective on the history and events of those times. Siddhartha Deb’s (b. 1970) fiction is tied more closely into the politics of the period and its consequences on his characters. Both The Point of Return (2003) and An Outline of the Republic (published in Great Britain as Surface; 2005) take place in remote northeastern India. The piecemeal and, in part, reverse-chronological presentation of The Point of Return, in which a son puzzles out his father’s life, is not entirely easy to follow, but both novels offer fascinating insights into yet another corner of India.

Kiran Desai (b. 1971)—the daughter of Anita Desai—began her writing career with Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), a comic novel about a man who tries to escape from the complications of everyday life by climbing into a tree and winding up being mistaken for a sage. Although she cannot entirely sustain the story, it is an enjoyable effort. Desai shows considerable growth and additional potential in The Inheritance of Loss (2006), set in northeastern India in the 1980s. In this novel, the lives of Sai and her grandfather, a retired judge, are affected by the activities of Nepalese insurgents in the area, and their cook places his hopes on his son’s ability to achieve the American dream. Both story lines illustrate the difficulty of finding one’s place in a community in the modern world.

Popular Fiction

Until recently, most of the Indian fiction that has been published in the West has had literary aspirations, but now more homegrown, purely popular fiction is also reaching audiences outside India. Former model Shobhaa Dé’s (b. 1948) glitzy and sensationalistic novels were the first local blockbusters of this sort. Although her fiction has never really caught on abroad, Bollywood Nights (originally published as Starry Nights; 1991) is a good example of her pulpy action-romances; all her up-from-the-gutter and high-society stories provide some entertainment value.

More recent novels often depict a rapidly industrializing India and the strains on society. Vikas Swarup’s (b. 1961) Q&A (now also published as the movie tie-in Slumdog Millionaire; 2005) is one of several clever concept-novels that tries to show contemporary Indian life as multifaceted. The protagonist is a contestant on a show like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and has astonishing, and suspicious, success in answering the questions, but his recounting his miserable life story explains how he acquired all this knowledge. Unfortunately, Swarup crams so much into this book (and his hero’s life)—most of it horrific—that it drowns in its own excess.

Swarup’s Q&A is a good idea gone slightly bad, but Chetan Bhagat (b. 1974) shows it can be even worse. His enormously successful books typically describe the lives of a small group of young adults making their way in the new Indian order. Five Point Someone (2004) has quickly become the classic modern novel of Indian campus life, describing the overwhelming rigors of the nation’s leading university, IIT, and how students deal with them. One Night @ the Call Center (2005) was inspired by the rise of outsourced customer support, now employing hundreds of thousands of young Indians. These are parts of Indian life rarely explored as fully in other contemporary fiction—except now in imitation of Bhagat—and are full of potential, but Bhagat’s lazily formulaic writing is little more than workmanlike, though at least it is fast paced.

Altaf Tyrewala’s (b. 1977) Mumbai novel No God in Sight (2005) zips along even faster than Swarup’s or Bhagat’s, jumping in each short chapter to yet another character, and while his rush leads to some carelessness, this is one of the liveliest and best of all these sweeping novels. The chain of the characters’ stories—or, more accurately, vignettes from their lives—moves across class and caste and shows the interconnectedness of contemporary Indian society.

Like Midnight’s Children, The God of Small Things, and The Inheritance of Loss, Aravind Adiga’s (b. 1974) The White Tiger (2008) won the most prestigious British literary prize, the Man Booker. Like those other Indian novels, it relies on a creative concept: it is presented as letters addressed to the premier of China. The statesman’s forthcoming visit to Bangalore inspires the protagonist to relate his life story, a rags-to-riches rise in the new Indian economy that shines a light on the dark underside of India’s recent success. In exposing the social divides and describing the opportunities and limitations in an Indian society undergoing rapid change and also mired in age-old traditions, The White Tiger can be engrossing, but the picture Adiga offers is often too muddled, and his epistolary approach seems pointless.

• The young protagonist of Anurag Mathur’s (b. 1954) The Inscrutable Americans (1991) spends a year abroad, trying to make sense of America, and although this book is already a bit dated, it is still an amusing study of cultural differences.

Adiga’s Last Man in Tower (2011) is very much a Dickensian novel set in contemporary Mumbai, in which a real-estate speculator wants to empty a building, Tower A, in order to develop the property. He offers the tenants large sums of money to leave, but one of them, Masterji, remains a holdout. Tower A is a microcosm of Mumbai and India, a premise that allows Adiga to examine many of the issues facing India today.

Indian-Language Literature

With dozens of widely spoken languages—at least five have more than 50 million speakers each (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, and Tamil)—India is a veritable Tower of Babel. Many of these languages have strong literary traditions, but relatively little fiction from any of them has been translated into English. The recent rapid growth of a pan-Indian publishing industry, with English as the dominant language, has greatly increased the availability of such literature in translation, at least locally. Although English seems still—or perhaps more than ever—to be the first choice for budding authors, a large body of work in regional languages remains to be discovered.

Urdu author Qurratulain Hyder’s (1927–2007) River of Fire (1959, English 1998) is one of the great Indian novels of the twentieth century, even in its “transcreated” English form, a revision for which the author herself was responsible. Spanning most of India’s history, continuity is sustained by its central characters, who reappear in different forms over more than two thousand years. The constant dialogue and interaction between the characters gives the book a sense of great immediacy, so history, even on this scale, is always very personal. While it does not address the most recent decades of Indian history, River of Fire is an ideal preamble to everything from Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame to Tyrewala’s No God in Sight. Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist (1979, English 1994) is a three-part novel largely set in Dacca (now Dhaka) that describes this Bengal region as it shifted from being part of British India before World War II to becoming, first, East Pakistan and then the entirely independent Bangladesh in 1971. Despite not having a single dominant character or story line, Hyder repeatedly shows how the characters’ different layers of identity—national, linguistic, political, religious—conflict and how they struggle deciding which are most important.

Naiyer Masud’s (b. 1936) Urdu stories are told in the first person in collections such as Essence of Camphor (English 1998) and Snake Catcher (English 2006). Masud, a translator of Kafka, shares some of the Czech master’s strangeness, but his tales are also distinctively Indian, especially their fanciful. but not too fantastical, elements.

Vilas Sarang’s (1942–2015) Marathi stories, most recently collected in The Women in Cages (English 2006) in English versions reworked by the author, take more surreal turns and feel more in the Latin American tradition. Sarang often turns to the Kafkaesque as well, though in his metamorphosis story, the protagonist wakes up to find himself transformed into an erect phallus and is revered as the incarnation of Lord Shiva’s lingam—before he eventually goes limp.

Hindi author Nirmal Verma’s (1929–2005) realist fiction is full of individuals who cannot break out of their isolation or connect with others. The collection The World Elsewhere (English 1988) is partly another exploration of the Indian abroad, with stories set in London and Central Europe inspired by Verma’s own experiences in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. His novel Dark Dispatches (1989, English 1993) is set during the Indian emergency of the mid-1970s, in which Indira Gandhi’s government cracked down on democracy. This novel recounts the widespread fear and paranoia of the time, which underscore the increasing alienation of Verma’s protagonist.

O. V. Vijayan’s (1930–2005) The Legends of Khasak (1969, English 1994) and The Saga of Dharmapuri (1985, English 1988) are among the finest postindependence Indian novels. Written in Malayalam, the language of the southern state of Kerala, these are two entirely different works of fiction. The Legends of Khasak seems at first to be a conventional tale in which a young teacher, Ravi, is sent to open and run a school in a small Indian village. Vijayan evokes Khasak as skillfully as Narayan did his Malgudi, and similarly, he has many different characters play significant roles in the story. The outsider Ravi has as much to learn from the locals as he has to teach them, in this world where the supernatural also has a place. If The Legends of Khasak is charming, The Saga of Dharmapuri is brutal in its political satire, with Dharmapuri a place that suggests an alternate India, facing the same problems and issues but on a much more horrific scale. Written in the time leading up to the 1975 emergency (but published only afterward), the author’s anger at the prevailing political corruption radiates throughout the text. The explicit language and coarse descriptions were shocking in their time but are entirely appropriate.

It is the high standard of the writing that sets apart Uday Prakash’s (b. 1951) Hindi novel The Girl with the Golden Parasol (2001, English 2008) from other Indian campus novels. The Girl with the Golden Parasol also addresses issues of caste and tradition in rapidly modernizing India. In each of the three stories collected in Uday’s The Walls of Delhi (English 2012), the protagonists seem to have an opportunity to escape their poor circumstances but are unable to do so. Uday’s sympathetic portrayal of the marginalized here is deeply affecting.

Very little of the crime and other popular fiction written in India’s regional languages has been translated. While perhaps of more dubious literary quality, such works often do offer a different kind of local color. Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s (1899–1970) Picture Imperfect (English 1999) is a collection of stories about an early Bengali detective figure, making it a good introduction to native Indian crime fiction. Famed Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s (1921–1992) thirty-five Feluda stories, narrated by the detective’s Watson-like sidekick, Top-she, were intended mainly for a younger audience but nonetheless are fine works in the Holmesian tradition. Meanwhile, The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (English 2008, second volume, 2010), edited by Rakesh Khanna, offers a wider sample of more recent popular Tamil fiction that also includes romance and science fiction.

• U. R. Anantha Murthy’s (1932–2014) classic Kannada novel Samskara (1965, English 1976) centers on rites and expectations in a Brahmin community.

• Yashpal’s (1903–1976) thousand-page Hindi epic centered on the lives of a brother and sister at the time of partition is finally available in English as the two-volume This Is Not That Dawn (1958, 1960, English 2010).

• Both Assamese author Indira Goswami (1942–2011) and Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi (b. 1926) wrote socially aware fiction.

Indian fiction has long completely overshadowed that from Pakistan, with only a few Pakistani authors attracting much attention abroad until recently. Ahmed Ali’s (1910–1994) Twilight in Delhi (1940) is widely considered one of the great novels of that city, but because it was published before Pakistan was an independent nation (and is set in the Indian capital in the early twentieth century), it can hardly be considered a representative Pakistani novel. Although Zulfikar Ghose (b. 1935) is sometimes claimed for Pakistan, he is undeniably transnational. His multinational background, which includes a childhood spent in both India and Pakistan, as well as extended residence in England and the United States, is mirrored in Statement Against Corpses (1964), a collaboration with the brilliant British experimentalist B. S. Johnson (1933–1973), as well as fiction set in Pakistan like The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) and The Incredible Brazilian trilogy (1972–1978).

Among the first prominent fiction to truly come out of Pakistan was that by Bapsi Sidhwa (b. 1938), but her Parsi background—she comes from the tiny community of Zoroastrians, whose faith differs markedly from the region’s dominant ones—in an Islamic country also make her atypical. Her largely realist novels, beginning with The Crow Eaters (1978), are grounded in her unusual Parsi background, which provides a wealth of material about cultural conflict. Rich with comedy, these are entertaining and well-written works.

Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s (b. 1923) Urdu novel Mirages of the Mind (1990, English 2014) is a big, digressive, and melancholy comic work. The main character is Basharat Ali Farooqi, who moved from Kanpur to Karachi with his family at the time of the Indian-Pakistani partition. Basharat remains nostalgic for the lost old world, which Yousufi uses to good effect in the many situations in which he places Basharat.

Contemporary Pakistani politics and larger geopolitical issues play major roles in the fiction of authors such as Mohammed Hanif (b. 1965), Mohsin Hamid (b. 1971), and Uzma Aslam Khan (b. 1969). Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), which reimagines the possible conspiracies regarding Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq’s mysterious death in a 1988 airplane crash, veers uneasily between literary satire and thriller mode. The depiction of the role of the military in Pakistani governance and life, as well as American influence over it, is of some interest, but the points Hanif tries to make feel forced.

Mohsin Hamid is a more assured writer, and both Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) crackle with the tension of contemporary Pakistani life. His narrative voices are particularly unsettling despite seeming so welcoming. Written in the present tense, the reader is drawn close to the action, yet Hamid also erects barriers that hold the reader at bay, a subtle, clever technique that gives his fiction a unique feel. Even though his narrators seem so forthright, the texts are full of ambiguity. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a monologue addressed to an unidentified American, the text solely the narrator’s side of the story. A Western-educated Pakistani who grew disillusioned with America and returned to Pakistan, the protagonist has become a popular university lecturer, his popularity due in part to his political engagement and anti-American message. How far that anti-Americanism goes is unclear, but in this post-9/11 world, the implications of every word and suggestion seem much larger, which Hamid fully exploits.

• The fiction by expatriate authors such as Adam Zameenzad (b. 1949), Kamila Shamsie (b. 1973), and Nadeem Aslam (b. 1966) is well worth a look.

Written in the second person, Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) takes another creative approach, chronicling his nameless protagonist’s rise from humble beginnings to great wealth in an unnamed country that resembles Pakistan but could be a stand-in for any number of rapidly modernizing Asian states. Hamid ultimately undermines his work by toying too much with his readers, but his novels are among the most revealing to come out of Pakistan.

Uzma Aslam Khan’s broad portraits of Pakistani life, such as the love story Trespassing (2004), are personal and family oriented, but she also mixes political and social commentary into her fiction. Her perspective also examines subjects that get less attention, as in The Geometry of God (2007), with its multiple strands that address the study and role of science in an increasingly religious society.

As part of Pakistan until the violent break in 1971, Bangladesh shares its dominant language—Bengali (Bangla)—and much of its literary tradition with neighboring Indian Bengal. With a large local market—Bengali has some 200 million native speakers—and relatively few authors writing in English, literature from Bangladesh has largely remained self-contained and has made few inroads abroad.

The internationally most famous contemporary Bangladeshi author is Taslima Nasrin (b. 1962), whose contentious work led to violent threats and a jail sentence in absentia, making it impossible for her to remain in her homeland. Nasrin already was controversial by the early 1990s, largely due to her open discussion of the abuse of girls and women and her condemnation of religion being used to excuse this behavior. Her documentary novel Lajja (1993, English 1994, and as Shame, 1997) further inflamed Muslim extremists. Its description of the treatment of the Hindu minority in Bangladesh, especially after the destruction of the mosque in India’s Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu fundamentalists, led to reprisals throughout India and Bangladesh. Ultimately, however, this book is of greater historical than literary interest.

Like many of the prominent English-writing Indian authors, Tahmima Anam (b. 1975) grew up exposed to a variety of cultures and pursued her higher education in the West. Her first novel, A Golden Age (2007), is set in Bangladesh and focuses on the 1971 war of independence. This family tale centers on the widow Rehana and her children, Sohail and Maya, and their growing involvement in this ugly conflict. The first volume of what is a planned trilogy, it is a powerful portrait of maternal love and obligation and the best literary introduction to modern Bangladesh currently available. The Good Muslim (2011) continues the story, with the novel shifting back and forth between the mid-1980s and the early period after the end of the war, when Maya went to work in the countryside as a doctor while Sohail retreated into fundamentalist Islamic faith. Without reducing her characters to simplistic types, Anam uses their experiences and attitudes to reflect on Bangladesh’s postwar transition.

Nepal is yet another country from which the authors who have received the most exposure abroad are those who write in English and were educated or based in the West. Samrat Upadhyay’s (b. 1974) first collection of stories, Arresting God in Kathmandu (2001), and his novel The Guru of Love (2003) provide insight into the country and culture, especially in his depictions of domestic lives. The universal complications of love and lust and family are well handled, and Upadhyay’s interest in this rather than relying on what is alien to Western read-ers—as authors of fiction set in such an out-of-the-way place often do—is welcome. The more recent stories collected in The Royal Ghosts (2006) give a vivid sense of the effects of the long-simmering Maoist insurgency in Nepal and also address such sensational events as the royals’ palace slaughter in 2001. Manjushree Thapa’s (b. 1968) The Tutor of History (2001) takes place mostly away from Kathmandu and revolves around an election campaign, revealing more local social and political conditions in Nepal. While successful as such, the subsequent upheaval in Nepali politics, which has seen martial law, the collapse and abolition of the monarchy, and the 2008 election of a Communist Party–led government, overshadow Thapa’s depictions.

• Himalayan Voices (1991) is an anthology of Nepali literature edited by Michael James Hutt. Although it does not offer samples of the newest Nepali fiction, it is a useful introductory text.

Among the few works of fiction translated from Nepali is Lil Bahadur Chettri’s (b. 1933) Mountains Painted with Turmeric (1957, English 2008), a social realist work about peasant life. Misfortune leads quickly to misery in this world, where there is little margin for error. Earnest and dark, the relatively simple story skillfully describes traditional rural Nepali life and the locals’ limited options. Narayan Wagle’s recent Nepali best seller, Palpasa Café (2005, English 2008), describes the ravages of the Maoist insurgency. Despite being a rather busy novel, the variety Wagle offers is a good overview of the reach and damage wrought in those years, on individuals and the society as a whole.

Shehan Karunatilaka’s (b. 1975) Chinaman (published in the United States as The Legend of Pradeep Mathew; 2010) is narrated by a once-successful sportswriter, W. G. Karunasena, now near death from chronic alcoholism. The discursive novel recounts his efforts to complete one important work, a biography of a legendary (fictional) Sri Lankan cricketer—the greatest of whom no one has ever heard—before he dies. The lives and fates of Karunasena, with his many failures (and limited successes) and his complicated relationships with family and colleagues, and cricketer Mathew, falling into and then embracing complete obscurity, also are representative of Sri Lanka itself. Despite its emphasis on cricket, Chinaman is also a rare sports-dominated novel that rises far above sports.

Several English-writing authors who left Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in childhood revisited the island state in their fiction. Michelle de Kretser’s (b. 1957) The Hamilton Case (2003), an atmospheric novel about colonial Ceylon, is partly a murder mystery. Rather than a neatly tied-up genre novel, however, the ambiguities that arise as the perspective and narrative voice shift from one section to the next section make a richer and more unsettling read. Michael Ondaatje’s (b. 1943) Anil’s Ghost (2000) takes place in contemporary Sri Lanka and investigates murder on a different scale by dealing with the ongoing civil conflict there. Identifying one set of skeletal remains is central to the plot, but the novel is full of characters whose identities and allegiances are difficult to pin down, reflecting the nation’s complex recent history.

Although Romesh Gunesekera (b. 1954) also left Sri Lanka at a young age, much of his fiction is situated there. In both the stories in Monkfish Moon (1992) and the nostalgic novel Reef (1994), the consequences of the civil war overshadow much else, with Gunesekera’s evocative and often lyrical prose lending additional force to the stories. Much of Reef revolves around food and cooking, and Gunesekera handles this particularly well.

• Shyam Selvadurai’s (b. 1965) coming-of-age novel is entitled Funny Boy (1994), and his novel of 1920s Ceylon is Cinnamon Gardens (1999).

• Poet Jean Arasanayagam’s (b. 1930) collection of stories is All Is Burning (1995).