Updated
Novels and story collections about Indian immigrants and their American kids: names, marriages, parents, money and what gets lost between two places.
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The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
Gogol Ganguli is named after a Russian writer by accident and spends years trying to get away from the name, and from his Bengali parents in Massachusetts.
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Interpreter of Maladies
Jhumpa Lahiri
Nine stories about Indians and Indian Americans, set in Boston and in India. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
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Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
Stories about the grown children of Bengali immigrants: their marriages, their parents getting older, and the ways they're still caught between.
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The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri
Two brothers in Calcutta. One joins the Naxalite movement, and the other leaves for graduate school in Rhode Island and ends up raising his brother's child.
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A Place for Us
Fatima Farheen Mirza
An Indian American Muslim family in California comes together for the oldest daughter's wedding, and the son who left comes home.
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Gold Diggers
Sanjena Sathian
A teenager in the Atlanta suburbs drinks a potion made from stolen gold that gives him its owner's ambition. Funny, and sharp about pressure to succeed.
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The Mistress of Spices
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Tilo runs a spice shop in Oakland and uses the spices' powers to help her customers, until she falls in love and breaks the rules.
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Before We Visit the Goddess
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Three generations of Bengali women: a grandmother in a village in India, her daughter who leaves for Texas, and the granddaughter who grows up American.
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Jasmine
Bharati Mukherjee
A young widow from a village in Punjab comes to America and becomes someone new in each place she lands, ending up in Iowa.
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Desirable Daughters
Bharati Mukherjee
Tara, divorced and living in San Francisco, is one of three sisters from a Calcutta family. A stranger shows up claiming to be her sister's son.
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Girls Burn Brighter
Shobha Rao
Two girls become friends in a poor village in India. When they're separated, one crosses the world looking for the other. Includes trafficking and violence.