Table of Contents
Most Popular . . .
More . . .
Hotlists 2008
Crime Fiction - embedded
Booklists
Lists of books, many of which received at least one starred review (indicating a work of unusual merit) from the following review sources: Booklist , Publisher's Weekly (PW), Kirkus and Library Journal (LJ). Additional titles of interest may be included on the lists. Titles are generally listed alphabetically by author.
Overbooked specializes in providing timely information about fiction (all genres) and readable nonfiction. Overbooked has been online since 1994. Overbooked is a work in progress . . .
Overbooked is the winner of the 2008 Louis Shores - Greenwood Publishing Award: to recognize excellence in book reviewing and other media for libraries. The award recipient is selected for significant achievement related to a reviewing process that helps librarians make selection decisions.
Booklists and Suggested Reading
Stars of India
Page Modified: August 19, 2008
Fiction & Nonfiction about India/America or by Indian or Indian/American writers. Suggested Reading: Asian American Stars
Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.
Fiction
2003
- The Point of Return
Author: Deb, Siddhartha
Publisher: Ecco $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060501510 Date: 2003
Booklist
Set in the remote, northeastern hills of India in the 1970s, The Point of Return revolves around the father-son relationship of a willful, curious boy, Babu, and Doctor Dam, an enigmatic product of British colonial rule and Nehruvian nationalism.
Updated 3.31.03 - The Ramayana
Author: Menon, Ramesh
Publisher: North Point $ 35 ISBN: 0865476608 Date: 2003
Kirkus
India's most beloved and enduring legend, the Ramayana is widely acknowledged to be one of the world's great literary masterpieces. Novelist Menon has rendered the tale in lyrical prose that conveys all the beauty and excitement of the original, while making this classic accessible to a new generation of readers.
Updated 3.13.03
2002
- The House of Blue Mangoes
Author: Davidar, David
Publisher: HarperCollins $26.95 ISBN: 0066212545 Date: 2002KirkusBooklist
The House of Blue Mangoes tells the story of the Dorai family in south India during a time of tremendous political and social upheaval. Sophisticated, filled with brilliant historical and emotional insight, enlivened by touches of humor and deeply felt tragedy that draw on the author's own family history.
Updated 2/24/02 - Desirable Daughters
Author: Mukherjee, Bharati
Publisher: Hyperion $ 24.95 ISBN: 0786865989 Date: 2002PW
From a respected writer of fiction comes a stirring novel of three Calcutta-born women, two continents, and a perilous journey from the old world to the new.
Updated 1/24/02 - Transplanted Man
Author: Nigam, Sanjay
Publisher: Morrow $24.95 ISBN: 068818191 Date: 2002PW
Sonny Seth is a medical resident at a New York hospital servicing a community of eccentric expatriates from India. Sonny's most demanding patient--known as the Transplanted Man--is a high-level Indian government official whose major organs have been transplanted at least once. Now deathly ill and hunted, he pulls Sonny into a soul-searching journey.
Suggested Reading: Medical Fiction
Updated 7.9.02
- The Hero's Walk
Author: Badami, Anita Rau
Publisher: Algonquin $ 23.95 ISBN: 1565123123 Date: 2001PW
Steeped in the colors, customs and sensuality of India The Hero's Walk is a moving story of a family and the potential for heroism in the small acts of ordinary people.
Updated 3/7/01 - The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
Author: Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee
Publisher: Doubleday $ 23.95 ISBN: 038549727x Date: 2001Booklist
From the bestselling author of The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart comes a collection of moving stories about family, culture, and the seduction of memory.
Updated 3/13/01 - Half a Life
Author: Naipaul, V.S.
Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375407375 Date: 2001KirkusBooklistPWLibrary Journal
Willie Chandran's flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians he affects a new identity. When he returns with his lover to her home in Africa during the last doomed days of colonialism, he lives yet another life not his own.
Suggested Reading: All Stars
Updated 10/8/01
-
A New World
Author: Chaudhuri, Amit
Publisher: Knopf $ 22 ISBN: 0375410937 Date: 2000Kirkus
In a story told through the eyes of an economist in the U.S. who returns with his young son to Calcutta to visit his elderly parents, readers see the rituals and customs of a middle-class family in contemporary India revealed in new and unexpected ways.
Updated 9/8/00 - Diamond Dust: Stories
Author: Desai, Anita
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 12 (trade paper) ISBN: 061804213x Date: 2000Library JournalBooklist
Gathering together radiant new stories, Diamond Dust travels from India to the American Northeast, deftly exploring the tensions between social obligation and personal independence, between old traditions and new. -
Blue Bedspread
Author: Jha, Raj Kamal
Publisher: Random $ 21.95 ISBN: 0375503129 Date: 2000Library Journal
Described by John Fowles as "remarkable, almost a coming of age of the Indian novel, " this powerful, penetrating debut work by a young Calcutta journalist is about the love and hope that can survive in the midst of family violence.
Updated 4/3/00. - An Obedient Father
Author: Sharma, Akhil
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $ 23 ISBN: 0374105014 Date: 2000PWBooklist
Ram, a Delhi school inspector, supports his daughter and granddaughter by collecting bribes for a Congress Party boss. On the eve of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, one reckless act bares the lifetime of violence and sexual shame behind Ram's dingy public career and thrusts him into a deadly political campaign. A debut novel.
-
Author: Baldwin, Shauna Singh
Title: What the Body Remembers
PWSet in Punjab against the background of the coming partition between India and Pakistan, What The Body Remembers tells the story of a Sikh family facing their own personal issues of authority and control as a man takes a second wife.
Author: Chaudhuri, Amit
Title: Freedom Song PWKirkus
In three short novels, readers follow the life experiences of the intimate world of Indian men, women, and children of the middle class living in Calcutta, Bombay, and England.
Author: Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee
Title: Sister of My Heart LJ
From the bestselling author of The Mistress of Spices comes a passionate novel about the extraordinary bond between two sisters and the family secrets, jealousies, and loves that threaten to tear them apart.
-
Author: Desai, Kiran
Title: Hullaballo in the Guava Grove
KirkusLJKiran Desai offers a wryly hilarious and poignant story of life, love, and family relationships, simultaneously capturing the vivid culture of the Indian subcontinent and the universal intricacies of human experience.
Author: Forbes, Leslie
Title: Bombay Ice Kirkus
Starring "the toughest, most sympathetic heroine since Smilla's Sense of Snow (Harper's Bazaar), this thriller set in exotic India tells the intriguing story of a British journalist whose life is put in jeopardy after a brutal murder.
Title: Inheritance
BL"A lithe and sinuous storyteller . . . Ganesan, like Arundhati Roy and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, is part of a glorious flowering of contemporary Indian literature."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist
Author: Rangel-Riberio, Victor
Title: Tivolem LJBL
Filled with rich, tantalizing detail, gentle humor, and ghosts of a history both international and personal, this warm, sweeping portrait of a small village in a Portuguese colony in India in the 1930s transports readers to a magical place and time gone forever.
Author: Vakil, Ardashir
Title: Beach Boy Kirkus
With the collapse of his parents' marriage and his father's sudden death, the ten-year-old son of a successful shipping broker finds himself caught between the innocence of youth and the responsibilities of adulthood.
-
Author: Chandra, Vikram
Title: Love and Longing in Bombay: Stories
PWKirkus On the heels of his award-winning and extravagantly praised first novel, RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN, Vikram Chandra offers five ingeniously linked stories--a love story, a mystery, a ghost story, and other tales spun by an elusive narrator sitting in a smoky Bombay bar. Critics around the world have embraced the book as a major work by this exciting young writer.
Author: Ghosh, Amitav
Title: The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery PWLJ
In a near-future New York City, the mysterious reappearance of a lost and battered ID card leads us back in time to 1995 Calcutta--and to the card's enigmatic owner, L. Murugan. A driven eccentric obsessed with the weird coincidences that led to British scientist Ronald Ross' groundbreaking discovery of how humans contract malaria, Murugan has stumbled upon evidence of a powerful unseen society and an impossible experiment in controlled destiny. In doing so, he has opened a Pandora's Box of dark and startling truths that will have momentous consequences for everyone and everything human.
Author: Mistry, Rohinton
Title: A Fine Balance PW
With the compassionate realism of Dickens and a narrative sweep worthy of Balzac, this internationally acclaimed novel draws an unforgettable portrait of the cruelty and corruption, kindness and heroism of India. Set in 1975, A Fine Balance follows the destinies of four strangers who are forced to share a cramped apartment in an unnamed city by the sea.
Author: Roy, Arundhati
Title: The God of Small Things BLPWKirkus
"A banquet for all the senses", said Newsweek of this bestselling and Booker Prize-winning literary novel--a richly textured first book about the tragic decline of one family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love.
Prior to 1997 (listed in order of publication, newest at the top)
Author: Rushdie, Salman
Title: The Moor's Last Sigh PWKirkus
Winner of England's prestigious Whitbread Ward, Rushdie's first novel in seven years is a peppery melange of genres: a deliciously inventive family saga; a subversive alternate history of modern India; a fairy tale as inexhaustibly imagined as any in The Arabian Nights; and a book of ideas on topics from art to ethnicity, from religious fanaticism to the terrifying power of love.
Author: Desai, Anita
Title: Journey to Ithaca Kirkus
A spiritual quest takes Sophie and Matteo to India, where Matteo is drawn toward the Mother, a charismatic and mysterious guru. In an effort to reclaim her lover, Sophie embarks on her own journey for the truth about the Mother's past and finds that wisdom is found in the journey itself, not at its destination.
Author: Tharoor, Shashi
Title: Show Business Kirkus
A triumphant new novel about the movie industry by the author of The Great Indian Novel. Tharoor's hero is Ashok Banjara, one of India's mega movie stars, a man of great ambition and dubious morals. Tharoor portrays the Indian film world as a metaphor for Indian society and weaves a tapestry of seduction and betrayal that is colorful--and serious.
Author: Sidhwa, Bapsi
Title: Cracking India Kirkus
Eight-year-old Lenny, spirited daughter of an affluent Parsee family, narrates the story of the breaking of India as she witnesses Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs fight for their land and their lives during the dividing of the country into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan in 1947. This 1991 Liberatur Prize winner, NYT Notable Book and ALA Notable nominee is now available in paperback for the first time.
Nonfiction
- India In Mind
Author: Mishra, Pankaj (ed)
Publisher: Vintage $ 14 ISBN: 0375727450 Date: 2005Booklist
Anyone who is enthralled by India--or who loves fine writing--will delight in this compendium of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry written by 25 of the country's most astute observers.
Updated 11.2.04 - The Red Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period
Author: Mehta, Ved
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth $ 22.95 ISBN: 1560256281 Date: 2004KirkusBooklist
When, as a boy, Mehta finds his father weeping uncontrollably on his mother's shoulder during a New York dinner party, he begins to unravel a family mystery that takes him on a painful and revealing voyage into his father's past in the exotic, closed world of British India.
Updated 10.19.04 - Maximum City: Bombay
Author: Mehta, Suketu
Publisher: Knopf $ 27.95 ISBN: 0375403728 Date: 2004PWLJ
A brilliantly illuminating portrait of Bombay and its people-a book as vast, diverse, and rich in experience, incident, and sensation as the city itself-from an award-winning Indian-American fiction writer and journalist. - Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: Travel Tales
Updated 9.22.04 - Marahanis: The Extraordinary Tale of Four Indian Queens and Their Journey From Purdah to Parliament
Author: Moore, Lucy
Publisher: Viking $ 25.95 ISBN: 0670033685 Date: 2005Booklist
Tracing larger-than-life-characters, Moore creates a vivid picture of an emerging modern, democratic society in India and the tumultuous period of imperialism from which it arose in this study of four Indian queens and their journey from Purdah to Parliament.
Updated 11.29.04
Hotlists
African American Fiction | Christian Fiction
2008 Excel Files: (download - print, sort, etc.)
Crime Fiction | Fiction | African American Fiction | Christian Fiction | Nonfiction Notables
Stars
Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec Crime Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec
Speculative Fiction Romance Historical Nonfiction | YA
Overbooked is a volunteer project undertaken by Ann Chambers Theis: Collection Management Administrator, Chesterfield County (VA) Public Library. 9501 Lori Rd. or P.O. Box 297, Chesterfield, VA, 23832. Phone: 804.748.1760.
Overbooked is not an official Chesterfield County Public Library service. Overbooked.org is a nonprofit web site hosted by CVCO - Central Virginia's Community Online. Overbooked.com is a nonprofit web site in experimental mode. Overbooked does not endorse any commercial providers (or their products and services) linked to from this web site.
Please join the conversation(s) at Overbookers - a rather quiet social space for the chronically overbooked.
Join the Overbooked List - A quiet list for readers to share recent reads, keep up to date with details about new books, discuss favorite authors/titles, etc.
Comments, suggestions, corrections: Ann Chambers Theis (AKA Ann/ACT):
overbooked1@verizon.net
or
ann@overbooked.com
I really appreciate all the e-mail I receive from avid readers and writers and regret that I am not able to respond to all correspondents. Special thanks to those folks who regularly help keep me on track...