Reading list: The debut works of ten icons – and pioneers – of Indian-American fiction

An Obedient Father, Akhil Sharma

As an inspector for the Physical Education Department in the Delhi school system, Ram Karan supports his widowed daughter and eight-year-old granddaughter by collecting bribes for a small-time 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 involves him in a farcical, but terrifying, political campaign that could cost him his life.

Bombay Time, Thrity Umrigar

At the wedding of a young man from a middle-class apartment building in Bombay, the men and women of this unique community gather together and look back on their youthful, idealistic selves and consider the changes the years have wrought. The lives of the Parsi men and women who grew up together in Wadi Baug are revealed in all their complicated humanity: Adi Patel's disintegration into alcoholism; Dosamai's gossiping tongue; and Soli Contractor's betrayal and heartbreak. And observing it all is Rusi Bilimoria, a disillusioned businessman who struggles to make sense of his life and hold together a fraying community.

Interpreter of Maladies: Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri

A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian-American girl recognises her cultural identity during a Halloween celebration while the Pakistani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds affinity with a woman from Calcutta. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession.

Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, these stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world.

Arranged Marriage: Stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

For the young girls and women brought to life in these stories, the possibility of change, of starting anew, is both as terrifying and filled with promise as the ocean that separates them from their homes in India. From the story of a young bride whose fairy-tale vision of California is shattered when her husband is murdered and she must face the future on her own, to a proud middle-aged divorced woman determined to succeed in San Francisco. Divakaruni creates eleven devastating portraits of women on the verge of an unforgettable transformation.

Atlas of Unknowns, Tania James

Linno is a gifted artist, despite a childhood accident that has left her badly maimed, and Anju is one of Kerala’s most promising students. Both girls dream of coming to the United States, but it is Anju who wins a scholarship to a prestigious school in New York. She seizes it, even though it means lying and betraying her sister. When her lie is discovered, Anju disappears. Back in Kerala, Linno is undergoing a transformation of her own. But when she learns of Anju’s disappearance, Linno strikes out farther still, with a scheme to procure a visa so that she can come to America to look for her sister and save them both.

Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics – their passion for the same woman – that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him – nearly destroying him – Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

The Tiger’s Daughter, Bharati Mukherjee

Born in Calcutta and schooled in Poughkeepsie, Madison, Manhattan, beautiful, luminous Tara leaves her American husband behind as she journeys back to India. But the Calcutta she finds on her return – seething with strikes, riots, and unrest – is vastly different from the place she remembers. In this taut, ironic tale of colliding cultures, Tara seeks to reconcile the old world – that of her father, the redoubtable Bengal Tiger – and the brash new one that is being so violently ushered in.

Shock, uneasiness, and haphazard transformations that are part of the immigrant experience are the subjects of Mukherjee’s debut novel.

The Twentieth Wife, Indu Sundaresan

Growing up on the fringes of Emperor Akbar’s opulent palace grounds, Mehrunnisa blossoms into a sapphire-eyed child blessed with a precocious intelligence, luminous beauty, and a powerful ambition far surpassing the bounds of her family's station. Mehrunnisa first encounters young Prince Salim on his wedding day. In that instant, even as a royal gala swirls around her in celebration of the future emperor's first marriage, Mehrunnisa foresees the path of her own destiny. One day, she decides with uncompromising surety, she too will become Salim’s wife. She is all of eight years old – and wholly unaware of the great price she and her family will pay for this dream.

The Prayer Room, Shanthi Shekharan

In 1974, the young and callow Englishman George Armitage goes to Madras in the hopes of returning with his PhD dissertation. Instead, he comes home with a bride named Viji, an Indian woman he barely knows. This seemingly unlikely pair wind up in Sacramento, where they buy a ranch house and give birth to triplets.

In this new American world of shag carpets and pudding pops, Viji seeks consolation in her prayer room, which she visits frequently to gossip, sass, and seek advice from the framed portraits of her dead relatives. It is here where Viji feels most herself, where she immerses herself in the comforts of home, and where these deceased family members feel “as real to her as she'd been to them.”

The Prayer Room re-examines the meaning of family – the people who live down the hall, the people who exist only in our memories, and the people who roll their eyes at you from within their picture frames.

English Lessons and Other Stories, Shauna Singh Baldwin

Dramatising the lives of Indian women from 1919 to 1991, from India to North America, Shauna Singh Baldwin travels from the intimate sphere of family to the wasteland of office and university. In this powerful collection, some characters say little but know much. Others, imprisoned by silence, choke on their knowledge or use it with bloody force against their oppressors. A few harness the power of wordlessness to seize freedom.