September fiction: Six new novels that bring stories from a city’s underbelly and beyond the planet

All information sourced from publishers’s blurbs.

The Interloper, Manoranjan Byapari, translated from the Bengali by V Ramaswamy

A youth walks into the Jadavpur railway station. Very soon, the denizens there – liquor vendors, rickshaw drivers, squatters, beggars, ragpickers, pickpockets – recognise him as Jibon, the daring young man who had done them many a good turn. And those who were certain he had perished in a deadly bomb blast in the city’s red-light area are astounded.

His memory lost, this Jibon finds himself a stranger to his own self. But he quickly learns to play the role of a man whose past allegiance to the Naxalites was marked by bloodshed. This is the Calcutta of the early 1970s, a time when a man with a stone prowls the streets after midnight, crushing the heads of homeless folk. It is a city where upper-caste refugees from the Bengal across the border have become affluent, even as their low-caste, poor compatriots have lost everything. Women are swindled and brutalised with alarming frequency here; orphans are kidnapped from public places and trafficked. The Congress party rules the roost, the ultra-reds have been finished, and the reds struggle to survive.

Jadavpur’s Jibon knows he’s an unnecessary creature in this “Saare Jahan Se Achcha” country. He is stuck in a relentless cycle of destitution, oppression and hatred. And yet, his veins throb with an inexplicable will to move forward.

Missy, Raghav Rao

Madras, India: The orphaned girls of St Ursula’s convent are destined to be nuns or servants but 17-year-old Savi dreams of escape. Responsible and good with languages, she’s taken on as governess for the wealthy Nandiyar family at their country estate.

The horrific events of a single night force Savi and her love, Ananda, into a dangerous journey, re-emerging in America under new identities, their homeland forever in their rearview.

But the past is never far away.

Forty years later, Savi, known to all as Missy, is the embodiment of the American dream – a successful business owner in Chicago, a pillar of the South Asian community, and mother to two brilliant, stubborn young women, Mansi and Shilpa.

Until Varun, a charming doctor, enters their lives, setting off a chain of events that puts Missy’s carefully constructed world in jeopardy with the revelation that you can never truly outrun your secrets…

The Grand Samara, Trisha Does

Home has always been a temporary arrangement for Samara Mansingh, a wayfaring wedding photographer and the daughter of a diplomat. When her father is uprooted once again, Samara needs a place to stay in Delhi.

Next stop: the Khanna family. Samara’s memories of the Khannas are vague at best, but she doesn’t remember their home feeling so much like a war zone. And the last thing their surly eldest son, Sharav, wants is a houseguest eavesdropping on the chaos. Sharav has a melodramatic sister pushing back on an arranged marriage, a withdrawn lead singer brother who won’t sing, and a widowed mother hiding her grief in the garden. Sweeping into the household like a tornado, irrepressible Samara is a practically perfect distraction. She has a mind to help a girl find true love, push a young man to find his voice and bring a lonely and loving widow out of mourning.

Maybe Samara can even get on Sharav’s ruggedly handsome good side. The only sure thing is that the Khanna family will never be the same again. Neither will Samara, who may finally find what she’s been missing her entire life: a home.

The Fertile Earth, Ruthvika Rao

Vijaya and Sree are the daughters of the Deshmukhs of Irumi. Hailing from a lineage of ancestral aristocrats, their family’s social status and power over villagers on their land is absolute. Krishna and Ranga, brothers, are the sons of a widowed servant in the Deshmukh household.

When Vijaya and Krishna meet, they forge an intense bond that is beautiful and dangerous. But after an innocent attempt to hunt down a man-eating tiger in the jungle goes wrong, what happens between the two of them is disastrous, the consequences reverberating through their lives into young adulthood.

Years later, when violent uprisings rip across the countryside and the Marxist, ultra-left Naxalite movement arrives in Irumi, Vijaya and Krishna are forced to navigate the insurmountable differences of land ownership and class warfare in a country that is burning from the inside out – while being irresistibly drawn back to each other, their childhood bond now full of possibilities neither of them is willing to admit.

The Extraordinary Life of Max Bulandi, Sidharth Singh

Nirvana’s life is a mess – he is a jilted lover, a bored addict and a disillusioned journalist. Nothing, it seems, can get him out of his funk.

Until one afternoon, when he discovers a pile of back issues of India’s premier youth magazine from the 1970s, Junior Standard. An article on a famed rock contest of the time catches his eye. It mentions a band called The Flow and their frontman, Max Bulandi, hailed as India’s answer to Jim Morrison. Nirvana is consumed by the article and when a chance meeting with an old Bombay rocker whets his appetite further, he embarks on a search for the mysterious Max Bulandi and the early pioneers of the Indian rock music scene. As he traces the lost history of The Flow across Bombay, Calcutta, Shillong and Benares, it opens up to him a world of riffs and beats that transforms his life quite completely.

Loka, SB Divya

Akshaya is the hybrid daughter of a human mother and an alloy, a genetically engineered posthuman – and she’s the future of life on the planet Meru. But not if the determined Akshaya can help it. Before choosing where her future lies, she wants to circumnavigate the most historic orb in the universe – the birthplace of humanity: Earth.

Akshaya’s parents reluctantly agree to her anthropological challenge – one with no assistance from alloy devices, transport, or wary alloys themselves who manage humanity and the regions of Earth called Loka. It’s just Akshaya; her equally bold best friend, Somya; and a carefully planned itinerary threading continent by continent across a wondrous terrain of things she's never seen: blue skies, sunrises, snowcapped mountains, and roiling oceans.

As the adventure unfolds, the travelers discover love and new friendships, but they also learn the risks of a planet that's not entirely welcoming. On this trek – rapturous, dangerous, and life-changing – Akshaya will discover what human existence really means.