From K-confessions to cricket romance, snappy tales from new India are taking a burst of first-time authors past the bestseller mark. It’s time to say hello to Indian popular fiction in English

Say, you had to fill a bookshelf entirely with our favourite fun books by Indian writers in English, which ones would you chose? The original bestselling campus novel, Inscrutable Americans, would go right in. If you aren’t a literary snob, you would slip in Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone there with due reverence. A couple of Shobhaa Des would go in too. A Suitable Boy could scrape in if it weren’t so darned long. There is something to be said for Salman Rushdie’s humour in Midnight’s Children, but that would be really stretching it. That’s about it, isn’t it? A sad shelf of four, maybe five books. Well, the reason for your scanty collection is that all these years, in all their wisdom, publishers and writers have handed us only The Great Indian Novel. In its pages were all the big issues, from the coming-of-age story of the nation to the plotline of postmodern angst. For that other traveller in us—the one hungry for the rollicking good yarn or the silly romance—it had nothing. But scan the bestseller lists of the past year and a half, and you’ll see your shelf filling up.

Nineteen-year-old Aparajita Walia, an engineering student in Pune, who has taken to reading a few months ago, would place her copy of The Three Mistakes of My Life. The single-in-the-city types would plump for Swati Kaushal’s Piece of Cake and the recent bestseller Almost Single (18,000 copies in less than a year) by Advaita Kala, if not the rather shrill The Zoya Factor by Anuja Chauhan and the deliciously bitchy Kkrishnaa’s Konfessions (heading for 5,000) by Smita Jain. The lads would pick all the Bhagats and the IIT/IIM/Corporate novels, spiked with a little cool marijuana of course—Amitabha Bagchi’s nuanced and well-written Above Average, Ravi Subramaniam’s If God Was a Banker and Karan Bajaj’s Keep Off The Grass.

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