Authors Like Arundhati Roy

The closest thing to Roy's double career that anyone has managed. Both write novels dense with the specific ecology and caste of one region, both write political non-fiction that names companies and ministries, and both keep insisting that a river, a dam or a forest is a political actor rather than a setting. Ghosh is the more scholarly and much the calmer of the two; his argument is built rather than declared. If you want the whole of Roy's range in another writer, this is the one.

The book that made a novel like The God of Small Things publishable, and the writer Roy was measured against in 1997 whether she liked it or not. Both write English bent to carry an Indian childhood, both build a family story that turns out to be a national one, and both have had the state and its supporters come after them for what they said afterwards. Rushdie is the more exuberant and the more comic; Roy is more precise and more angry. Read Midnight's Children for the inheritance, Knife for what it costs.

The novel to hand a reader who loved The God of Small Things and wants that experience again. Both take a caste system and a national crisis and refuse to let either stay in the background; both are structured so that a small domestic cruelty in chapter two turns out to have been the whole book. Mistry is the plainer writer — no wordplay, no broken chronology — and considerably harder to finish, because he does not give his characters the small mercies Roy allows hers.

The clearest living example of the thing Roy's career is about: what happens to a writer who describes a community accurately in a country where describing it is treated as an attack. His fiction is quieter than hers and much more local — goats, wells, marriages, land — but the pressure that came down on him is the same pressure she has spent thirty years writing about. Read One Part Woman, then read the note about his return; the two together explain more about Indian free expression than most reporting does.

Roy's direct predecessor, and the one she has acknowledged. Everything in Walking with the Comrades — the Adivasi villages, the mining leases, the insurgency treated as a consequence rather than a crime — was Mahasweta Devi's subject for forty years before Roy went to Bastar. She writes shorter and harder, in fiction that reads like a case file, and she was an organiser as well as a writer. Read Draupadi first; it takes twenty minutes and will stay with you for years.

The nearest match if what held you in The God of Small Things was the household rather than the argument. Desai writes the same material — a decaying family house, colonial hangover, servants and employers bound together and lying to each other, a political movement arriving at the gate — with the polemic left out. She is funnier than Roy and much less certain about who is to blame, which some readers find honest and others find evasive.

The tradition Roy's essays belong to. Both write political non-fiction as literature rather than as reporting, both put a named corporation and a named minister inside a sentence built like a poem, and both get the same two reviews every time: that it is magnificent, and that it is unfair. Galeano is the more lyrical and the less specific. If Capitalism: A Ghost Story is the Roy you return to, this is where that voice comes from.

Roy's closest contemporary in English-language political non-fiction, and the two have appeared on platforms together. Both write long-form argument aimed at a general reader, both work from the position that economic policy is a form of force, and both are attacked less for their evidence than for their tone. Klein is the more systematic and the more willing to revise; Roy is the better prose writer by some distance. Start with The Shock Doctrine if you came to Roy through The Algebra of Infinite Justice.

The opposite temperature, on adjacent ground. Lahiri writes Indian families with the same attention to what a meal or a name carries, and none of Roy's fury — her characters are damaged by migration and expectation rather than by the state. Reading her after Roy is like stepping indoors. She belongs on this list mainly for readers who loved the Ayemenem household and would rather not be told about dams, and she is the best writer of ordinary sentences on it.

Everything Roy argues against, written by someone whose sentences are impossible to dismiss. Naipaul looked at the same country and concluded that its wounds were largely self-inflicted and that its ideologies were consoling fictions; Roy looks at it and finds a state doing specific things to specific people. He is on this list because reading them together is the fastest way to test your own position, and because A House for Mr Biswas is a great novel written by a man whose views and conduct are documented and ugly. Both facts are true at once.