Shortlisted for the Man Booker in 1979, A Bend in The River perhaps missed the prize because the VS Naipaul - the Trinidadian writer of Indian origin – had already won in 1971 with In a Free State. The novel, often compared with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and described as a "full-bodied masterpiece" tells the story of Salim, a merchant, who sets up shop in an unnamed East African Country, in an unnamed town at the bend of a river of which Naipaul claims he knew very little of. It was written in a short span of thirteen months with some of it coming to the author in a dream.

A Bend in The River is No. 83 on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Published in 1979.

In 1984, Sahitya Akademi awardee Anita Desai was shortlisted for her unusual work In Custody that was made into a film in 1993. “Magnificent”, Salman Rushdie noted in The Observer about the novel in which the author successfully digresses from her earlier, almost obsessive preoccupation with female characters.

In Custody is the story of Deven who, unlike the protagonists of Desai’s other novels, is not suffering from any grave tragedy or is trapped helplessly in family ties and obligations. A frustrated poet, lecturer and husband, he is caught in the web of his own foolishness causing much annoyance to his readers. He believes that he is ‘in custody’ of others, especially Nur, the great Urdu poet he tries to interview but from whom he fails to extract anything useful.

Published in 1984.

"Those who continue to harp on the decline of the novel ought to . . . consider Rohinton Mistry," wrote the New York Times. “He needs no infusion of magic realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is magical.” Indo-Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry has only written three novels, and has been shortlisted for Booker all three times.

A Fine Balance is his second novel, set in Bombay during the turmoil of the Emergency and brings together four mismatched strangers – two tailors, a widow and a student – under a humble, decrepit roof. Soon the empty apartment turns into a full home and the strangers into a family. Each one of them is escaping from their cruel circumstances, hoping to retain their human spirit in the most inhuman state.

A Fine Balance won the Giller Prize in 1995. It was successfully produced on stage at the Hampstead Theatre in London in 2006 and a three-part dramatisation of the acclaimed novel was aired on BBC Radio 4 from March 22 to April 5, 2015.

Published in 1995.

Not many would emerge clean from those dens and give us a prose so poetic that lingers like smoke and stays in the head even when it’s over. The prologue of a single sentence that runs through six-and-a-half pages is reason alone to pick this stunning debut novel from the Indian poet and musician.

It pulls the reader slowly and languorously into Sukhlaji Street in Bombay, where they taste the best opium and prepare the pipe efficiently and lovingly, because it’s precisely through this that they will view the world across the 304 pages, a world that’ll soon be invaded by the more dangerous heroin. Drawing on his own years as a drug addict – "the lost 20 years of my life" – Jeet Thayil, gives us, among other memorable characters, Dimple, the eunuch so keen to read and learn and who evokes both passion and empathy in equal measure.

Narcopolis was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize. It won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013 at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival.

Published in 2012.

"Wonderful poisons . . . so good it’s impossible to get rid of them, after all these years they’re still doing their work."

Writing about an unspeakable horror without sinking to sentimentality and then managing to add humour, too, is a near impossible task. But Indra Sinha pulls it off so brilliantly that it put his Animal’s People in the 2007 Booker shortlist and made it win the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

The novel, based on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, is narrated by Animal – a 19-year-old orphan who walks on all fours. He has lost his parents and his spine in the accident at the kampani (company) in Khaufpur and is "undesirable to women despite the great size of his penis". Sooner than he realises, he is sucked into politics, scams and twisted plots with Zafar, an activist campaigning against kampani and from whom Animal wants to keep away Nisha, the woman he loves.

Published in 2007.