Indian Culture

When a young man is given the chance to rewrite his future, he doesn't realize the price he will pay for giving up his past... Casablanca's stinking alleys are the only home that nineteen-year-old Youssef El-Mekki has ever known. Raised by his mother in a one-room home, he dreams of escape -...

Anne Tyler meets Jade Chang in this buoyant, good-hearted, and sharply written novel about a blithely optimistic immigrant with big dreams, dire prospects, and a fractured extended family in need of his help—even if they don't know it yet Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised...

To All the Boys I Loved Before meets World of Dance in this delectable love story that combines food, dance, and a hint of drama to cook up the perfect romance. Radha is on the verge of becoming one of the greatest kathak dancers in the world . . . until a family betrayal costs her the biggest...

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits evokes the grit and enduring grace that is modern Morocco. As four Moroccans illegally cross the Strait of Gibraltar in an inflatable boat headed for Spain, author Laila Lalami asks, What has driven them to risk their lives? And will the rewards prove to be...

"The Greatest Story Ever ToldDispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins-the Pandavas and the Kouravas-but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters...

Much about Nalanda remains shrouded in mystery. When was it founded? Who founded it? Who studied and taught there? What subjects were offered? How many students and teachers were there? Was Nalanda a university in the modern sense? And what ultimately led to its downfall? Nalanda by Abhay K...

The first definitive natural history of the Indian subcontinent. Did you know that the exquisite caves of Ellora were hewn from rock formed in the greatest lava floods the world has known—eruptions so enormous that they may well have obliterated dinosaurs? Or that Bengaluru owes its unique...

Winner of the 2024 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist for the 2024 Washington State Book Award and the 2025 PNBA Book Award “Spare, beautiful and richly layered, The Liberators is dazzling.” ―Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage “A piercing, patient debut by one of our...

A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries. Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using...

Now Filmed as 1947, a motion picture by Deepa Mehta Few novels have caught the turmoil of the Indian subcontinent during Partition with such immediacy, such wit and tragic power...

Ayesha Shetty lost her brother seven years ago, the same time she lost everything else important to her: her dreams, her fierce independence, and the man she loved. Not wanting to see her mother hurt anymore, she put her wild self away and became the dutiful daughter her mother needed and took on her brother’s role in the family business. Now her best friend’s big, fat Indian wedding is a chance to get away from her endless duties at the restaurant and maybe even have some fun (if she remembers how).

Discover the endless fascination of Indian culture with five tales, selected for you for their power of evocation, wisdom and humor. "The Alligator and the Jackal" is a tale of wit and cleverness, about which will defeat the other. "Singh Rajah and the Cunning Little Jackals" is another example of how cleverness can overcome even the most powerful. "The Farmer and the Money-Lender" shows the eternal struggle between class, and a way to trick the tricker; "Who Killed the Otter's Babies?" will bring you deep reflections about causality and responsibility; and Tit for Tat is a powerful lesson about the dangers of habits.

When the star players on a high school football team are accused of violence by another student, their secrets—and the secrets of their parents—threaten to shatter their entire community in a gripping novel of race, class, and privilege from the author of Members Only. “Timely and timeless...

A bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece’s private confession to the reader—she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British. "I have been waiting for Nina McConigley's debut novel for years and it's even better than I...

In this follow-up to the critically-acclaimed The Laughter—winner of the Washington State Book Award—a middle-aged woman starts a firestorm when she holds a contest, based on an ancient Indian ritual, in which men must compete to win her affections. A woman who has left two husbands...

Authored by the most influential Indian President yet, this book delves into the obstacles that are preventing India from rising up to the challenge of development. India has unmatched talent and ambition with an inherent tendency to work hard, then what is it that keeps India from overtaking...

When Sharifa and her husband travel to India, she expects her time will be spent researching her great-great grandfather, a wealthy businessman and philanthropist. However, what she doesn’t expect is to be swept up in the story of his four wives, oddly excluded from her family history. As...

David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi - the name means "enemy ancestors" in Navajo - who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism.

From the world’s great concert halls to Los Angeles’s Skid Row, violinist Vijay Gupta’s searing memoir of prodigy, ambition, collapse, and renewal reveals how music is not just performance but also survival, a lifeline of human connection when everything else falls away—for readers of...

Charles Alexander Eastman (1858-1939), an educated and well-known Sioux, saw both sides of the great divide between Indians and whites, and he wrote 11 books attempting to reconcile the two cultures. This book is his illumination of Indian spiritual beliefs and practices. A convert to Christianity, Eastman never lost his sense of the wholeness and beauty of the Indian's relation to his existence and to the natural world.