5 bestselling Indian books that could be blockbuster movies

Movies and books continue to be the main source of entertainment for us. And Indian authors have become a tribe to reckon with. While international authors have always successfully transited from books to movies; for e.g.; JK Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone’ not only sold more than a 100 million copies, but also grossed over 2 billion in revenues as a movie; we are hoping to see more Indian authors do the same.

This got us thinking; what makes a book appealing for adaptation by film or TV producers? How can you tell if a book is screen-worthy? Books that are extremely popular, have a great deal of mass appeal, are intriguing and keep you captivated.

And so a really good book is bait for a lot of people — on the strength of a book you're able to attract really great talent to work on its adaptation; because readers want to get closer to the characters they love.

We shortlisted 5 such books, who have already won the Crossword Book Award, and here goes;

1. The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide is a very contemporary story of adventure and unlikely love, identity and history, set in one of the most fascinating regions on the earth. Off the easternmost coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans.

2. Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra: The novel draws the reader deep into the life of Inspector Sartaj Singh—and into the criminal underworld of Ganesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster in India. It is is a story of friendship and betrayal, of terrible violence, of an astonishing modern city and its dark side.

3. Past Continuous by Neel Mukherjee: Set in 1970s and 80s India, 90s England and in the first decade of twentieth-century Bengal, on the eve of Lord Curzon’s infamous Bengal Partition of 1905, Past Continuous is a scalding book about dislocations and alienations, about outsiders and losers, about the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories and about the consolations of storytelling. It is also a book about the impossibilities of love.

4. Sea of Poppies (The Ibis Trilogy) by Amitav Ghosh: The story is set prior to the First Opium War on the banks of the holy river Ganga, and in Kolkatta. The author compares the Ganges to the Nile, the lifeline of the Egyptian civilization, attributing the provenance and growth of these civilizations to these selfless, ever-flowing bodies. He portrays the characters as poppy seeds emanating in large numbers from the field to form a sea, where every single seed is uncertain about its future.

5. The Bankster by Ravi Subramanian: The uneasy calm in Greater Boston Global Bank (GB2) is shattered when a series of murders rock the façade of the compliant and conforming bank that GB2 has built up over the years. Who is to blame? Who is driving these intriguing and bone chilling murders? What is the motive behind these gruesome killings? No one has a clue.


(This article is authored by Sonal Gandhi , Buying and merchandising- Head books at Crossword book stores)