Selections from the Subcontinent
We have had quite a few lists featuring our favourites from different Indian cities, Indian work in translation, and more. But this week we decided to focus on the rest of South Asia, and put together a selection of some quality recommendations from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and beyond. Focusing on the past couple of decades, here are seven subcontinental novels that you should explore.
Mohammad Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 2008
A brilliant satirical work that explores betrayal, tyranny, family, and conspiracy, Mohammad Hanif’s debut book was shortlisted for many awards and is one of the most absorbing Pakistani novels of recent years. Taking the 1988 aircraft crash that killed Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq, but then fictionalising it with dark humour and an unforgettable voice, this one is well worth picking up.
Tahmima Anam - A Golden Age, 2009
A Golden Age is the first novel by Bangladesh-born novelist Tahmima Anam. It tells the story of the Bangladeshi War of Liberation through the eyes of one family, and explores the struggle for independence from a personal perspective. The novel was selected as the best debut novel in the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2008 and shortlisted for various other honours.
Zia Haider Rahman - In the Light of What We Know, 2015
Against the backdrop the breaking of nations and the economic crisis, and moving between Kabul, New York, Oxford, London and Islamabad, In the Light of What We Know tells the story of people wrestling with legacies of class and culture. On a September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and marriage unravelling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London home, a forgotten friend from his student days, a brilliant man who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Exploring globalisation, class, love and war, this is one of the finest south Asian novels of recent years.
Rafia Zakaria - The Upstairs Wife, 2015
This memoir is ‘an intimate history of Pakistan’ that uses the personal to expound on the political. Zakaria uses the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to begin an exploration of the country of her birth. Her Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, and young Rafia grows up in the shadow of family troubles, rising Islamisation and the world outside her home turning ever more chaotic and violent. The Upstairs Wife is a deeply personal look at the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities in Pakistan.
Anuk Arudpragasam - The Story of a Brief Marriage, 2016
Anuk Arudpragasam shot to fame with his second novel, the excellent Booker nominated A Passage North. But his debut is also worth checking out - a feat of extraordinary sensitivity and imagination, a meditation on the fundamental elements of existence as the world around us collapses. Set over the course of a single day and night during civil war, this unflinching debut confronts marriage, life and death with Arudpragasam’s unique voice at the heart of it.
Muhammad Khalid Akhtar - Love in Chakiwara, 2016
Technically a much older book that was translated to English by Bilal Tanweer in 2016, this Karachi novel is a hidden gem. The neighbourhood of Chakiwara is humdrum and unspectacular, but in its shops and at the street corners, there is curious business afoot. Chronicling the drama that unfolds daily is Iqbal Hussain Changezi, bakery owner and collector of writers and geniuses. Muhammad Khalid Akhtar presents a world at once familiar and peculiar but always surprising, his unforgettable characters keeping alive the old ways in a quietly changing Karachi in post-independence Pakistan.
VV Ganeshananthan - Brotherless Night, 2023
Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and one of the best Sri Lankan books of recent years, Brotherless Night is the story of Sashi, a courageous young woman trying to protect her dream of becoming a doctor as civil war devastates Sri Lanka.Set during the early years of Sri Lanka's three-decade struggle, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman's moral journey and a testament to both the enduring legacy of war and the bonds of home.