Siddhartha Deb Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Siddhartha Deb is an Indian published author.

He was born in 1970 in India and moved in 1998 to New York on a fellowship. He has been a journalist in Delhi and Calcutta, and he has written for the New Statesman, the Guardian, and TLS.

Siddhartha was born in Shillong, in northeastern India. He attended Calcutta University and then Columbia University. He started a career in journalism in Calcutta working as a sports journalist in 1994. He then decided to move to Delhi and there he wrote cultural essays, book reviews, and longform features focusing on the drowning of coal miners, the life of spice market migrant workers, the fate faced by Muslim singers who have performed at Sikh and Hindu religious ceremonies and Muslim places of worship who were going through marginalization thanks to India embracing neo-liberalism as well as Hindu nationalism.

He moved to New York in 1998 thanks to a graduate fellowship that he received from Columbia University and their Department of English and Comparative Literature. He would publish his first novel The Point of Return not long after, a somewhat autobiographical novel that is set in a fictional town close to Shillong in the Northeast of India.

The book was picked as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He would follow that up with Surface, which was also set in India in the Northeast. The book follows along with a Sikh journalist who has become disillusioned and it was released in the US under the title An Outline of the Republic. It made the shortlist for the Hutch Crossword Award in India and also made the longlist for the International Dublin Impac Prize.

He has also written a nonfiction book that was titled The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India. It came out in 2011 and was published in India without the first chapter due to a defamation lawsuit from one of the subjects who was featured in the first chapter.

He is one of the few writers from India who has been consistently critical of different things in India, from its nationalism to its neo-liberal development model as well as the Hindu-right political establishment’s rise. The first two books that he wrote critiqued many of these topics while the nonfiction book challenged the view of India as a superpower on the rise with lots of economic growth.

He has written a book titled The Light at the End of the World that came out in 2023. The book was thought to be a form breakthrough while also dealing with various themes that include authoritarianism, colonialism, and climate change. The novel has been compared to the writings of authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavia Butler, H.P. Lovecraft, and more.

The book was described by Feroze Rather as an ‘enraged epic’ that is ‘full of humanity’. It is also mixed in with different moments of love, compassion, and solidarity to break up the epochs of hate, intolerance, and bigotry, as noted by the author in The Nation.

Siddhartha Deb has appeared on Democracy Now! As a guest. He has also has been a contributor to such outlets as The Guardian, The Boston Globe, the Nation, Harper’s, New Statesman, the London Review of Books, as well as The Times Literary Supplement.

Siddhartha served as a columnist for The New York Times’ Bookends column from 2015 to 2017. He also served as a columnist during the same frame of time for Baffler magazine. Deb also was a contributing editor for the New Republic and contributed to books pages for publications such as The Nation, Harpers, and N+1. He has also written quite a bit on other writers that include H.P. Lovecraft, Hanya Yanagihara, Naiyer Masud, Don DeLillo, John Berger, and more.

Deb is the recipient of the PEN/Open Book Award in 2012 for his work The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India, for which he also made the shortlist for the Orwell Prize. Deb was awarded the Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize, N+1 in 2024.

The Point of Return is a 2002 book from Siddhartha Deb. If you have been looking for an intriguing fictional book that is influenced and loosely based on the author’s own life and full of detail, check this book out.

This story is set in India in its northeastern remote hills. Babu is a willful boy who is always curious and Deb focuses on the father and son relationship between Babu and Doctor Dam, who has come from a background of Nehruvian nationalism and British colonial rule.

When told in a reverse chronological order, this story takes a look at an India where the same ideals that were able to help bring liberation from the shackles of colonial rule are starting to crack under rebellions and conflicts bringing new pressure.

This has meant for Babu and Dr. Dam that they are living in the same house but as strangers, their only tie to each other their blood relation. The father gets older, and Babu tries to better understand him as he grows even more tired.

Meanwhile, the small town ethnic clashing shows that they are strangers to India too. Babu may end up going on an ambitious journey– one that takes him through the various memories about his family, father, and nation. Read this book to find out what happens in an intriguing debut from Siddhartha Deb.

Surface is the second book from Siddhartha Deb. It was released in 2005 and also goes by the title An Outline of the Republic. If you enjoy Deb’s work or have been looking for something new to add to your literary lineup, check this book out!

Main character Amrit has been sent to the North-East of India on a strange assignment as a reporter for the Sentinel. He is not completely on board at first but has been picking up on the fact that his career is not going anywhere and thinks this may be the start of getting something going.

If he takes the assignment, he might be able to spark enough interest to help him get a job at a foreign magazine. He has a contact there and might just be able to rejuvenate his career. He might even be able to break through with his lead on a young woman in a photograph who has been paraded before the press after being taken captive by insurgents.

He follows her trail but things start to burn out and his quest is shrouded in mystery. Can Amrit find out the truth or will he get lost on the way to an intended destination? Read Surface/An Outline of the Republic from Siddhartha Deb to find out.