If you’ve been inspired by Heart Lamp to seek out more fiction about life in India from a female perspective, here’s our selection of Booker-nominated works
On 20 May, Heart Lamp became the second book by an Indian author to win the International Booker Prize – as well as the first by an Indian translator, and the first originally written in Kannada. Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi join a distinguished list of writers born in India whose books have won the Booker or International Booker, including Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children, Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things, Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss and Geetanjali Shree for Tomb of Sand.
Heart Lamp is also part of a much larger cohort of Booker-nominated books set in India, not all of them written by Indian authors. There’s The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, Pyre by Perumal Murugan, The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee, China Room by Sunjeev Sahota, Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil and Animal’s People by Indra Sinha, to name a few.
Across 12 short stories, Heart Lamp chronicles the everyday lives of women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India. It’s a feminist collection, written and translated in a colloquial style that vividly captures people’s real voices and experiences. It sits in stark contrast to some of the other books about India that have been nominated for a Booker in the past – novels by authors who have focused on the white British experience during colonial rule, such as Staying On by Paul Scott and Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Heart Lamp also stands out as being both a book about women and one written (and translated) by a woman. The selection of acclaimed books below celebrates some of the other women whose works of fiction about India have been nominated for – or have won – the Booker or International Booker Prize.
2025 winners Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi holding their International Booker Prize trophies
© David Parry for the Booker Prize FoundationWinner of the International Booker Prize 2025, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq is a powerful collection of 12 short stories, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi.
Capturing the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India, the set of stories seeks to highlight the patriarchal oppressive systems under which these women live.
‘My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates,’ Mushtaq said in an interview with the Booker Prizes.
Max Porter, Chair of the 2025 judges, described the book as ‘a radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation.’
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A hugely popular winner of the Booker Prize in 1997, The God of Small Things tells the story of twins Estha and Rahel, and the shocking consequences of a pivotal event in their young lives. Arundhati Roy’s poetic debut novel is set in Kerala in the 1960s and has been translated into more than 40 languages.
Roy paints a vivid picture of life in a rural Indian town, the thoughts and feelings of the two small children, and the complexity and hypocrisy of the adults in their world. The book also offers a poignant lesson in the destructive power of the caste system and moral and political bigotry in general.
According to Nadifa Mohamed, who was shortlisted for the Booker in 2021, ‘This is a novel that doesn’t age, that captures both the precise and the general, that teaches us again all that we need to know about life.’
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An urgent protest against the destructive impact of borders, whether between religions, countries or genders, Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize in 2022.
In northern India, an 80-year-old woman’s determination to fly in the face of convention confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two. To her family’s consternation, and after a very long spell confined to her bed, Ma insists on travelling to Pakistan, confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition.
Despite its serious themes, Geetanjali Shree’s light touch and exuberant wordplay – captured in wonderful detail by translator Daisy Rockwell – ensures that Tomb of Sand remains constantly playful and utterly original. The judges said, ‘This is a luminous novel of India and Partition, but one whose spellbinding brio and fierce compassion weaves youth and age, male and female, family and nation into a kaleidoscopic whole.’
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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980, Anita Desai’s accomplished family drama explores how the unexplored crises of childhood can reveal new worlds.
To Tara, revisiting her childhood home in old Delhi, the dusty, shabby house and neglected garden seem only too familiar, her sister and brother quite unchanged. Yet the impression is superficial, for here is no dead end, and within the old and the known there are new discoveries to be made. Tara’s visit stirs many memories of a shared past.
In an interview in 2022, Desai said that Clear Light of Day is ‘in a way the most autobiographical [novel] I wrote […] Not that it is about my life at all, but it is about the house, the home, the neighbourhood and also about the time when I grew up’.
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The Lowland follows two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who were born 15 months apart and are inseparable. Becoming involved in the communist Naxalite movement, their paths diverge, and tragedy ensues, changing not only their lives but also affecting future generations.
The 2013 Booker-shortlisted novel is set during the political upheaval of 1970s India, with Lahiri inspired by true events that occurred in Kolkata, not far from where her grandparents lived. Lahiri was born in London to Bengali parents from Kolkata, moving to the United States when she was a child.
Sara Webster from the Chicago Review of Books said that, ‘Lahiri’s writing is at once musical and practical, and I mean that as high praise. As a stylist, Lahiri writes with grace, and has a talent for finding profundity in the ordinary.’
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Winner of the Booker Prize 2006, Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss alternates between two perspectives – that of orphan Sai, who has come to live in the mountains of the Himalayas with her grandfather Jemubhai Patel, and Biju, who lives illegally in the United States. Exploring themes of post-colonialism and the loss of traditions and identity, the book explores how the two characters struggle to acclimate to their new environments.
Kiran Desai is the daughter of another renowned Booker author, Anita Desai, and was born in Delhi before moving to the United States.
Ann Harleman from The Boston Globe called it a terrific novel, ‘Read it! Why? First of all, there’s the novel’s generosity. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss spans continents, generations, cultures, religions, and races…it offers all of the pleasures of traditional narrative in a form and a voice that are utterly fresh.’
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Orphaned and taken to an ashram in the fictional Indian temple town of Jarmuli as a young girl, Nomi later returns to produce a documentary. While there, she seeks out answers to her traumatic history, crossing paths with various characters, including a trio of elderly women on a pilgrimage, a temple tour guide and a singing tea cart owner.
Anuradha Roy was born in Kolkata and works as a novelist, journalist and editor, and Sleeping on Jupiter was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015. Calling it a magnificently crafted and luminous tale, Chelsea Leigh Horne from The Washington Independent Review of Books said, ‘The novel is at once a lyrical display of writing and a commentary on life in India … Sleeping on Jupiter is not just an important read, but an essential one.’
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Avni Doshi’s debut novel, Burnt Sugar, is narrated by artist Antara, who is the daughter of Tara, a wayward rebel in her youth who abandoned her marriage to join an ashram. There, Tara leaves little Antara with an older American woman while devoting herself fully to the ashram’s spiritual leader, Baba. Now an elderly woman, Tara is succumbing to a fading memory and Antara – now a married artist – is tasked with caring for a woman who never really cared for her in return.
Doshi was born in New Jersey to Indian parents who immigrated to the United States and often spent time in Pune, India, with her mother’s family.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020, the judges called it an utterly compelling read that ‘examines a complex and unusual mother-daughter relationship with honest, unflinching realism – sometimes emotionally wrenching but also cathartic, written with poignancy and memorability’.
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