Motherland by Vineeta Vijayaraghavan [in aMagazine: Inside Asian America]
Another debut, Motherland tells the coming-of-age story of 15-year-old Maya. Afraid that she has become too Americanized growing up in New York, Maya's parents ship her off for the summer to the remote, mountaintop home of...
A startlingly complex novel, The Glass Palace opens with a literal bang, as British cannons thunder over the noise of a busy Burmese marketplace in 1885. A historical work that sweeps over a century...
Raj Kamal Jha’s slim debut novel, The Blue Bedspread, is fabulous. It is perhaps the best book I’ve read this year – maybe even several years. It’s also a precious find, not the least...
A word of advice: Don’t read The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (which just won the Pulitzer for fiction) at the same time as Anita Desai’s new collection of short stories, Diamond Dust....
The story of the gifted young Prince Siddhartha who leaves his life of luxury and forsakes everything on this earth to seek the Truth of life over death. His search leads him to the path of...
Gay-Neck, an especially talented pigeon, is the pride of his owner, a young Indian boy from Calcutta. The bird spends a summer in the Himalayan mountains, honing his skills, and eventually proves to be a hero...
Independent, headstrong Sabah heads to India in search of her ethnic identity. What she finds in the wealthy world of her Indian relatives is a liberal Westernized culture bound by strict traditions, where the...
A retired civil servant living along the holy Narmada River whose banks are believed to contain 400 billion sacred places, comes into contact with numerous travelers and their mesmerizing stories, including an ascetic monk...
In 1929, Bhusan Singh, the aimless son of a wealthy raja, is on a train headed for his family home when he is arrested, falsely charged with treason, and imprisoned. Efforts to free him...
Mira returns to her native India after graduate school in England, to a new address on Nampally Road, a new lover, and new friends. But the post-colonial India she has returned to is governed...