Updated
In 1947 British India was split into India and Pakistan, and millions of people crossed the new borders. Many families still don't talk about it. The first six books are fiction and the last five are history and oral history. All of them describe violence, including violence against women.
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Cracking India
Bapsi Sidhwa
Lenny, a young Parsi girl in Lahore, watches her city and the people around her turn on each other. Also published as Ice-Candy-Man.
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Train to Pakistan
Khushwant Singh
A village of Sikhs and Muslims on the new border stays peaceful until a train full of dead bodies arrives.
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Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Saleem Sinai is born at the exact moment India becomes independent, and his life follows the country's. Won the Booker Prize.
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Pinjar
Amrita Pritam
A young Hindu woman is kidnapped by a Muslim man just before Partition and can't go home. Translated from Punjabi.
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Mottled Dawn
Saadat Hasan Manto
Short stories and sketches of Partition by one of the great Urdu writers. Some are a few lines long.
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The Night Diary
Veera Hiranandani
A middle grade novel. Twelve-year-old Nisha writes to her late mother as her family leaves their home in Mirpur Khas for India. Newbery Honor.
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The Other Side of Silence
Urvashi Butalia
Oral history from the women, children and Dalits whose stories were left out of the official accounts.
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Remnants of Partition
Aanchal Malhotra
Twenty-one objects people carried across the new border, and the stories of the families who kept them.
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The Great Partition
Yasmin Khan
A history of how Partition happened and what it did to ordinary people. A good first history to read.
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Midnight's Furies
Nisid Hajari
The violence of 1947 and how it set India and Pakistan against each other for decades.
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Partition Voices
Kavita Puri
Interviews with British South Asians who lived through Partition as children, based on her BBC radio series.