Indian-abroad chic lit

You savoured Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh. You giggled with Helen Fielding and Sue Townsend. Now for the best of both worlds. Indian-origin authors abroad pick up the chick-lit quill — and spell out the cross-generational nuances of fractured histories, of fitting in and falling out in a foreign (or not) land.

Monica Pradhan’s The Hindi-Bindi Club: Three American desis — divorcee, ’settled’ and single — begin a reluctant negotiation with their roots. The boundaries of their two deftly straddled worlds is marked by their bindi-bearing, Hindi-spouting, curry-stirring mothers’ ‘club’. Recipes included; ditto arranged marriages, first loves, dark pasts. Rs 395, Bantam/Bloomsbury

Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted: 10-year-old maths prodigy Rumi’s Cardiff schooling mirrors the author’s own childhood playground. But simmering under the surface of ordinary adolescent awkwardness is a real and deep distress over a hardboiled father’s strictures, grounded in his own, perhaps enforced, cultural cleavage. Is escape to Oxford the best rejoinder? Rs 395, Viking

Priya Basil’s Ishq and Mushq: A promising novel, begun in the throes of Partition and moving to London via Uganda with Sikh heroine Sarna. Her painfully embarrassing, ecstatically if wrong-headedly self-assured assimilation into English-ness is but the tip of an iceberg of haunting secrets in her marriage. Rs 495, Random House

Dip in. Stir up a soul curry.