If you liked Neel Mukherjee's A Life Apart...
...here are another couple of acclaimed novels by young Indian writers on similar themes...
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Reviewed by The Sunday Telegraph as ‘blazingly savage and brilliant’, this Booker-winning novel tells the of a diminutive, overweight ex-teashop worker who now earns his living as a chauffeur in modern India...
Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur and murderer. Balram, the White Tiger, was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream of escape. When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi behind the wheel of a Honda. Amid the cockroaches and call-centres, the 36,000,004 gods, the slums, the shopping malls, and the crippling traffic jams, Balram learns of a new morality at the heart of a new India. Driven by desire to better himself, he comes to see how the Tiger might escape his cage...
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Winner of the Booker Prize in 2006, Desai’s novel examines the tensions between Western and Eastern values during civil unrest in the foothills of the Himalayas...
At the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, lives an embittered old judge who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook's son trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy. When a Nepalese insurgency threatens Sai's blossoming romance with her handsome tutor they are forced to consider their colliding interests. The judge must revisit his past, his own journey and his role in this grasping world of conflicting desires - every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal.
