The best Indian fiction of 2026 so far

Aptly titled, this novel features exactly the type of protagonist readers love to hate: a simpering, lonely, lying boy, spoiled by his rich Delhi parents, living in LA to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. Like the complicated lead of Yellowface, our protagonist here works at Yogurtland but writes an anonymous blog about being a successful actor, lies on his CV to secure a job as an assistant for a “Hollywood Family”—one of his duties is “tracking of gastroparesis diet” of the family dog as well as the behavioural response to said diet—and faces lots of casual racism. Fun fact: Sethi was inspired to write The Simp after seeing a similar job posting by a wealthy New York art world family.

Three years ago, Parini Shroff gave us The Bandit Queens, about a group of women in a fictional village in India who take matters into their own hands when the men behave badly. Her second novel, Some People, has finally hit the shelves this month. The central characters are two people seldom depicted together in literature or pop culture—a son-in-law and mother-in-law. Especially not when the former is set to divorce the latter’s daughter. Malti Patel, the mother-in-law, has had a bit of a fall. So, as a dutiful son-in-law, Nathan Whitlock volunteers to play nurse. All the while, his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Kavya, is in another country. This duo, in particular, is separated by age, culture, upbringing, but as they spend time together they uncover old resentments, tiptoe around, and then battle through emotional minefields with humour, awkwardness, and a whole lot of heart.

The family saga is becoming quite the hit in lit fic these days (see: The Persians, This Is Where the Serpent Lives, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny). The Complex plays on similar themes. It revolves around the Chopras, a political legacy family that lives in a large joint family setup in Delhi. It is, quite literally, a complex of people, with a complicated tangle of familial relationships, complete with backstabbing relatives, property-greedy uncles, that one NRI cousin, and lots of creepy men. The central characters are Gita and Sachin, newlyweds who emigrate to the United States but are still constantly pulled by the latter’s family, including one predatory right-wing uncle and Sachin’s morally upright sister.

Meena Kandasamy’s new novel, Fieldwork as a Sex Object, moves from theory to praxis, imagination to action, the digital to the real, as it follows Amrita (Amy) Chaturvedi, a student activist living in London, whose life comes apart when a deepfake pornographic clip of her begins to travel and morph through social media, WhatsApp groups, the ecosystem of Hindu incels, and the manosphere (“all fascists sound the same because fascism is the enemy of individual expression”). Through it all, Amy is dealing with constant phone calls from her mother, a fractured relationship with her best friend/the love of her life, and platitudes from almost everyone else. (Read our full interview with the author here.)—Sana Goyal

From Avni Doshi, the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar, comes a 226-page story about a woman going through a divorce. Our lead is a writer who is unable to write, and whose life is slowly falling apart, after her husband decides to walk out of their marriage after 13 years. In the aftermath, our unnamed protagonist wanders into her subconscious, looking for warning signs in what she had assumed to be a happy marriage. She accepts, then hates herself for accepting help from her parents and simpering sister. It’s a tale of betrayal, rage, and insecurity, joining the archive of numerous novels about marriage and divorce that released recently, Strangers by Belle Burden, being another standout title this year.

This 200-page autofiction work by Zeenat Nagree, set in the early 2000s, takes us through life from the POV of a 12-year-old protagonist (also called Zeenat). Her teacher asks her class to write an essay on their summer vacation—a task Zeenat practises daily in her cramped Mumbai apartment. It’s a chronicle of her innermost thoughts as a girl on the cusp of teenhood. When a kidnapping rocks her community, an anxiety sets in, along with the fear of violence that could cast a shadow over her life. A Goodreads review of the novel muses, “Felt like reading Judy Blume—albeit grittier—set in another time and place.”

A regional literary handbook of sorts, Bloomsbury has taken on the task of compiling a collection of stories from six of the richest literary traditions from the Indian subcontinent—Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Sinhala, Malayalam, and Urdu. The first two volumes, in Konkani and Kannada, are out now. Each one focuses on a short story (some as long as 40 pages) by five of the region’s most well-known writers. In the Kannada edition, International Booker Prize winner Banu Mushtaq pens a story, ‘Not a Woman’, about a community trying the son of a rich family for ‘ruining’ a girl, while the Konkani volume features Sahitya Akademi winner Damodar Mauzo and his story about the dangers of the Raja Beta syndrome, a spoiled boy, and his regretful parents.

Eleven stories by Booker Prize-winning author Geetanjali Shree have one thing in common—experimentation in style and scope. Each one offers the reader a glimpse into the way of thinking that has come to define the author and lead to her magnum opus, Tomb of Sand. The first story breaks the fourth wall between the narrator and the reader. One story has a woman on a writer’s retreat with robots fall in love with the sky, while another simply portrays a woman walking in compulsive circles near her home. Themes range from love and joy to nostalgia and reality, each guaranteeing a thoughtful pause and ponder that comes with reading great fiction.

From the JCB Prize-winning author-translator duo of Moustache comes a 432-page political novel that imagines a fictional world in which the kingdom of Thiruvithamkoor declares itself a free nation on August 17, 1947. It paints a portrait of people caught in divided communities, ideologies, and political intrigue. A blend of fact and fiction, August 17 blurs the lines to present an alternative history of Kerala. Reviews laud Jayasree Kalathil’s translation but suggest that one read it in Malayalam to grasp its full scale and scope.

A sequel to Interstellar MegaChef, the first of the Flavour Hacker duology, this one provides some (simulated) food for thought. While the lead duo, Saras and Serenity, won the Interestellar MegaChef competition in the previous book, this one deals with the aftermath of that fame. Plus, there’s a sweet tension between the protagonists after their kiss, Earthling prejudice to deal with, and of course, evocative food scenes.

This is a coming-of-age story set amidst the charged climate of a newly independent India. Charulata Chitol runs away from home to the city of opportunities, Bombay. Like her father, she too works for the Indian railways. Casual sexism, the myriad events that shape India in the years after Independence, and Miss Chitol’s own aspirations take the story forward. As a reviewer writes, “It is not every day that a man writes convincingly from a woman’s point of view.” Spanning three decades, the elegiac novel keeps the magical quotidian workings of the railways at the heart of it all.

Absolute Jafar is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel that follows Brighu Sen, a restless walker and recurring character from Banerjee’s 2004 work Corridor, as he reflects on love, migration, fatherhood, and the idea of home. At its heart is an Indo-Pak romance that survives years of political hostility, only to unravel after the couple move to Berlin. Their son, Jafar, grows up disconnected from the imagined homeland his father tries to preserve through bedtime stories filled with djinns, street food, and family lore. Set across Delhi, Karachi, and Berlin (with detours to Tokyo, Kolkata, and Chicago), this visually arresting graphic novel explores how borders and memory shape identity and relationships. (Read our full interview with the author here.)—Sheya Kurian

A debut novel, a love story, an immigrant’s story—Belgrave Road is all that and more. Mira, arrange-married to an Indian man living in London, moves to the city, scared and out of place, especially when she learns that said man is in love with someone else. But Mira has a secret, too. At work she meets a quiet man named Tahliil, an asylum seeker from Somalia, and a truly forbidden love story unfurls.