Book picks similar to
An Incurable Insanity by Simi K. Rao


fiction
contemporary-romance
first-reads
contemporary

2 States: The Story of My Marriage


Chetan Bhagat - 2009
    Girl loves boy. They get married. In India, there are a few more steps: Boy loves Girl. Girl loves Boy. Girl's family has to love boy. Boy's family has to love girl. Girl's Family has to love Boy's Family. Boy's family has to love girl's family. Girl and Boy still love each other. They get married.Welcome to 2 States, a story about Krish and Ananya. They are from two different states of India, deeply in love and want to get married. Of course, their parents don't agrees. To convert their love story into a love marriage, the couple have a tough battle in front of them. For it is easy to fight and rebel, but it is much harder to convince. Will they make it?From the author of blockbusters Five Point Someone, One Night @ the Call Center and The 3 Mistakes of My Life, comes another witty tale about inter-community marriages in modern india.

Ladies Coupé


Anita Nair - 2001
    In the intimate atmosphere of the all-women sleeping car - the 'Ladies Coupe' - Akhila asks the five women the question that has been haunting her all her adult life: can a woman stay single and be happy, or does she need a man to feel complete?This wonderfully atmospheric, deliciously warm novel takes the reader into the heart of women's lives in contemporary India, revealing how the dilemmas that women face in their relationships with hunsbands, mothers, friends, employers and children are the same world over.

Against All Odds


Jazz Singh - 2013
    He’s a rich successful businessman, however, and she’s a small-town girl who doesn’t fit into his glittering world; a fact that Abhimanyu’s mother has taken pains to point out.Will they ever overcome the odds, or are their lives on parallel tracks, never destined to cross?

Adventures with Max and Louise


Ellyn Oaksmith - 2011
    As the mysterious Diner X, her pseudonym for a restaurant review column, she thrives on blending in. But before you can say "medical malpractice," she wakes up from a routine procedure to find that her chart got switched with someone else's, and now her A cup runneth over.Suddenly, unassuming Molly is turning heads wherever she goes. The man she's been pining for since high school is sitting up and taking notice, a very handsome stranger has captured her attention, and her lifelong dream of publishing a cookbook is about to come true. But Molly feels like an imposter. Will some advice from a very strange place help her figure out how to navigate her new, full-figured world?Molly realizes her revamped shape might change her life. She just doesn't anticipate quite how much . . .

A Matter of Time


Shashi Deshpande - 1999
    His wife, Sumi, returns with their three daughters to the shelter of the Big House where her parents, Kalyani and Shripati, live in oppressive silence: they have not spoken to each other in thirty-five years. As the mystery of this long silence is unraveled, a horrifying story of suffering and loss is laid bare, a story that seems to be repeating itself in Sumi's life.Set in present day Karnataka, A Matter of Time explores the intricate relationships within an extended family encompassing three generations. Images from Hindu religion, myth, and local history twine delicately with images of contemporary India as this family faces and accepts the changes that have suddenly become part of their lives. As their secrets and strengths are revealed, so are the complications of family and culture. This multigenerational story, told in the individual voices of the characters, catches each in turn in the cycles of love, loss, strength, and renewal that become an essential part of their identities.

Cobalt Blue


Sachin Kundalkar - 2006
    The novel was Cobalt Blue, the story of a brother and sister who fall in love with the same man, and how a traditional Marathi family is shattered by the ensuing events – a work that both shocked and spoke to Marathi readers.

Sugarbread


Balli Kaur Jaswal - 2016
    She seeks clues in Ma’s cooking when she’s not fighting other battles—being a bursary girl at an elite school and facing racial taunts from the bus uncle. Then her meddlesome grandmother moves in, installing a portrait of a watchful Sikh guru and a new set of house rules. Old secrets begin to surface but can Pin handle learning the truth?

Ready for Air: A Journey through Premature Motherhood


Kate Hopper - 2013
    She is tired and heavy and worried, and she wants her wine and caffeine back. But then, at a routine checkup, her doctor frowns at her chart and says, “I’m worried about a couple of things”—and unpleasant suddenly seems like paradise. What follows is a harrowing, poignant, and occasionally hysterical journey through premature motherhood, from the starting point of “leaking a little protein” to the early delivery of her tiny daughter because of severe preeclampsia and the beginning of a new chapter of frightful, lifelong love.Half a million babies are born prematurely in the United States every year—almost one every minute—each with a unique story, and Hopper eloquently gives a voice to what their parents share: the shock, the scares, the lonely nights in the neonatal intensive care unit, the fierce attention to detail that makes for sanity and craziness, the light of faith, the warmth of family, and the terrifying attachment. Through it all runs the power of words to connect us to one another, as Hopper draws on her gifts as a writer first to help her navigate this uncertain territory and then to tell her story. With candor, grace, and a healthy dose of humor, she takes us into the final weeks of her pregnancy, the this-was-not-part-of-the-plan first weeks of little Stella’s life, and the isolated world she and her husband inhabited when they took their daughter home at the onset of a cold Minnesota winter. Finally, frankly, Hopper ventures into the complicated question of whether to have another child. Down-to-earth and honest about the hard realities of having a baby, as well as the true joys, Ready for Air is a testament to the strength of motherhood—and stories—to transform lives.

How To Survive Your Sisters


Ellie Campbell - 2008
    Grab it while you can!Alternate cover edition for ISBN-10: 148273155XISBN-13: 978-1482731552A wonderfully warm and witty debut novel about family secrets and sibling rivalry.The four MacLeod sisters are no strangers to sisterly rivalry and with one of them about to be married, there are bound to be fireworks. Perfectionist Natalie wants the 'wedding of the year'. Harassed mother, Milly, just wishes her bridesmaid's dress wasn't the size of a tent. Career-obsessed Avril secretly moons over a married man and world traveler, Hazel, the youngest, yearns to be taken seriously. Forced together for the first time in years, and with an unexpected guest stirring up old resentments, squabbles are inevitable. But when tragedy strikes things really fly apart - as some shocking skeletons emerge rattling from the crowded MacLeod closet..

Chokher Bali


Rabindranath Tagore - 1903
    First published as a serial, a novel on love, family and sexuality in Bengal society.

Penumbra


Bhaskar Chattopadhyay - 2016
    . . As Prakash reaches the venue, he is introduced to a motley group of people, all gathered there for the old man’s big day: his son, his reticent brother, a dignified middle-aged lady who once owned the bungalow, a listless lawyer who manages his legal affairs, a mild-mannered young man who works as his secretary, his beautiful, young biographer, and his mysterious friend, who has never lost a game of chess to him. As the storm lashes on through the night, one of the people in the bungalow is murdered! In a game of cat and mouse that follows, Prakash soon finds out that under the surface of apparent warmth and friendliness, nothing is as it seems and that the bungalow holds one shocking secret after another! In a bid to save his own life, Prakash hunts for the truth, which lies in a mysterious penumbra of shadows and lights, covered in a sheath of deceit and guile, only to realize that the worst is yet to come!

Lethal Spice


Swati Kaushal - 2014
    Six contestants with a world to gain and everything to lose. Three judges who stand between them and their dreams. It is October in Shimla. The air is crisp, the mist is rising and the stakes are sky-high as the finalists of India's No. 1 reality cooking show, Hot Chef, are pitted against each other in a live shoot at the historic Gaiety Theatre. The spices are ground, the fires are lit, the knives have been sharpened? Then things start to go horribly wrong. As she picks her way through a maze of testimonies and motives, Shimla's Superintendent of Police, Niki Marwah, is more determined than ever to get to the bottom of a perplexing mystery - a mystery that this time around is dangerously close to her heart.

Born Confused


Tanuja Desai Hidier - 2002
    and finding your heart wherever, from an amazing new young author.Dimple Lala doesn't know what to think. She's spent her whole life resisting her parents' traditions. But now she's turning seventeen and things are more complicated than ever. She's still recovering from a year-old break-up and her best friend isn't around the way she used to be. Then, to make matters worse, her parents arrange for her to meet a "suitable boy." Of course, it doesn't go well... until Dimple goes to a club and finds him spinning a magical web of words and music. Suddenly the suitable boy is suitable because of his sheer unsuitability. Complications ensue.This is a story about finding yourself, finding your friends, finding love, and finding your culture -- sometimes where you least expect it.

The Windfall


Diksha Basu - 2017
    and Mrs. Jha’s lives have been defined by cramped spaces, cut corners, gossipy neighbors, and the small dramas of stolen yoga pants and stale marriages. They thought they’d settled comfortably into their golden years, pleased with their son’s acceptance into an American business school. But then Mr. Jha comes into an enormous and unexpected sum of money, and moves his wife from their housing complex in East Delhi to the super-rich side of town, where he becomes eager to fit in as a man of status: skinny ties, hired guards, shoe-polishing machines, and all. The move sets off a chain of events that rock their neighbors, their marriage, and their son, who is struggling to keep a lid on his romantic dilemmas and slipping grades, and brings unintended consequences, ultimately forcing the Jha family to reckon with what really matters..

Narcopolis


Jeet Thayil - 2012
    In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium.Outside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.Narcopolis is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.