100 Books Like The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories

The great children's author of Matilda and Willie Wonka fame offers a glimpse into his deeply peculiar psyche and whimsical mixture of the comical and the grotesque. In this collection of wonderful stories, Roald Dahl has included colorful characters and bizarre situations only he could think up. 

My favorite is Lamb for the Slaughter, where the answers to a cop’s death lie right under his colleagues' noses. This book is a perfect segue to Switch Bitch, a book as risque as they get, showcasing the range of the author’s literary oeuvre. 

Reading this book, one is left marveling at the vast canvas inside the author’s mind and his amazing command of the English language, which has not received adequate justice from any Wes Anderson movie.

My second pick is also an impressive, wide-ranging author - from generation-spanning sagas to prison diaries to collections of short stories. Among his several books of short stories, I find this the best as each story in the collection has a very interesting—literally—twist in the tail. These twists hit more and closer to the reader’s heart as the reader is really invested in the well-fleshed-out characters, such as the relatable mechanic-turned-reluctant-chef in ‘A la Carte.’ 

Though Jeffrey Archer is the master of pulp fiction, I find his pacing crisper in his short stories. They are fast-paced and breezy and smack you hard on the back on your way out.

William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name, O. Henry, was an American writer known primarily for his short stories. He also wrote poetry and nonfiction. He is most famous for his short story "The Gift of the Magi", from which many modern romantic novels and books have been derived.

I, however, like The Last Leaf more for its poignant climax and the delicate depiction of empathy. His other stories in the collection are sepia-tinted portrayals of a different world in a more genteel times with a cast from all stratas of American society. All the other stories are equally entertaining and engrossing.

Least known among the five, John M. W. Smith has made the short story with a twist in his niche, with an assortment of wacky stories and scary stories with surprising endings. What I liked most about the book is its simple writing and uncomplicated plots. However, despite the storylines being linear, the endings were unpredictable.

Interestingly, since the reader knows that the author is leading one towards a plot twist, the anticipation builds in a crescendo towards the climax—and on coming across the unexpected ending, the reader is left with awe at the dexterity of the handling. Of the lot, I found A Social Handicap and Every Dog Has Its Day the most endearing and satisfying.

A year or so ago, I read a lot of factual books about India, so I was delighted to find this Golden Age cozy mystery set in a land I was falling in love with through books. This book took me back to a pre-partition India still under British rule, with a realistic glimpse of life under colonialism alongside a hefty–hopefully less realistic–dose of murder and mystery.

I adored how Harini Nagendra created a strong, independent female character who still feels genuine and believable in the time and place in which the book is set–a time when most women were stifled, submissive, and governed by their husbands–and how the observations of colonization feel true to life while remaining both sympathetic and observant to the Indian culture and ways of life.

The setting is vividly portrayed, and the sights and sounds of 1920s India are an absolute delight. The main characters… show more.

A deep dive into culture, internal conflict, and the struggle to overcome external challenges. The characters in this book were deep and interesting. Their struggle was heartbreaking, and there was nothing you could do to fix the system they were in. They never gave up, even when all hope was lost. 

I was looking for a writer to breathe new life into the sometimes-stuffy traditional English novel format, and Wilkie Collins is that man. In what is widely considered the first detective novel, Collins introduces many of the tropes of the classic whodunit, including the English country house setting, the gentleman detective, the skilled professional contrasted with the bungling local investigator, and a generational curse arising from the initial theft.

Underlying this gripping tale is the truth that the moonstone belongs not to one of the principal players who compete for it but to the religious site in India from which it was originally stolen. Justice has an immediate, local, eternal, and global context. The result is a book with memorable characters and enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until the end.  

An ill-timed robbery and a mysterious ghost train—both from 1914—and the present day CIA and MI6: All are perfectly normal, abnormal elements to this Clive Cussler novel.

I especially like this book for its ties to recent American history. It flirts with elements of espionage and the crackerjack job of merging a confounding prologue with a mystery that needs solving. There is a combination of Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels that have influenced my own story-telling, and this one is among them.

Cussler penned an entire series around his National Underwater and Marine Agency Projects Director, Dirk Pitt. Nearly every one of the novels begins with an event of the distant past that culminates in the present. This novel follows that pattern but involves political concerns regarding the North American Continent. While Cussler’s characters only occasionally rise to the challenge of emotionally involving me, his plots—the twists, turns, and historical antecedents—always… show more.

I thought this book was such a heartfelt and tragic story. It’s about a family struggling with their past as the city of Delhi gets taken over by the British as it becomes their new capital. The author paints these beautiful scenes of Delhi, like the traditional pigeon flying and the bustling Chandni Chowk market.

I could really feel his love for the city in those descriptions. To me, the story felt like a lament for the old Delhi that was lost to the British, and you can sense how hard it was for the author to accept that. In the introduction, he talks about how he left India and was never allowed to return, so this goodbye isn’t just part of the story; it’s personal.

The modern-day Jaya, grieving after a third miscarriage and trouble in her marriage, goes to India to learn more about her grandmother, Amisha, who lived under the British occupation in the 1930s. Amisha’s servant and confidant, Ravi, tells Jaya about Amisha’s life so that Jaya comes to understand its relevance to her.

I was especially touched to see how learning about her ancestors' lives helps to heal Jaya in the present.