Recommendations
Books Like Maximum City
Best books to read after Maximum City by Suketu Mehta
Maximum City is a total portrait of a city: its organized crime, its film industry, its dancers, its police, its riots, its impossible density and beauty. These 8 books share its immersive ambition to understand a complex place from the inside, its narrative journalism, and its insistence on the full humanity of everyone its portraits.
- 1Buy
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
by Katherine Boo
Boo's 2012 National Book Award-winning portrait of life in a Mumbai slum — adjacent to the luxury hotels next to the international airport — is the essential companion to Maximum City: where Mehta covers Mumbai's entire social spectrum, Boo focuses entirely on one community at the city's bottom, and reading both books together gives the fullest picture of the city available in English.
- 2Buy
A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
Mistry's 1995 novel about four characters brought together in a Bombay apartment during the Emergency of the 1970s is one of the great novels about Indian poverty and its relationship to politics, and the most important fictional companion to Maximum City in the tradition of Indian social literature.
- 3Buy
The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
Adiga's Booker Prize-winning 2008 debut novel — narrated by Balram Halwai, who murders his employer and becomes a successful entrepreneur, writing letters to China's Premier Wen Jiabao — is the sharpest fictional portrait of India's class system and the violence of its economic development, a complement to Maximum City's nonfiction portrait of the same social forces in Mumbai.
- 4Buy
Shantaram
by Gregory David Roberts
Roberts's 2003 novel — based on his own experience living in Mumbai's slums after escaping from an Australian prison — shares Maximum City's immersive quality and its affection for the city's criminal underworld, though it is a novel rather than journalism and its hero is a white foreigner rather than a returned native, which produces a very different portrait of the same city.
- 5Buy
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini's 2003 debut about Afghanistan before and after the Soviet invasion shares Maximum City's quality of making a foreign country — its specific social hierarchy, its daily texture, its particular forms of kindness and cruelty — legible to a Western audience without reducing it to familiar categories.
- 6Buy
Gang Leader for a Day
by Sudhir Venkatesh
Venkatesh's 2008 sociological memoir about studying a Chicago housing project gang shares Maximum City's method of gaining unprecedented access to a criminal subculture through personal relationships — and the same ethical complications of the researcher who cannot stay purely neutral about what they observe.
- 7Buy
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
by Anne Fadiman
Fadiman's 1997 account of the clash between a Hmong refugee family and the American medical system shares Maximum City's interest in the incomprehension between different systems of meaning — and its refusal to assign simple blame, instead describing how each party's logic is internally coherent while the two logics are catastrophically incompatible.
- 8Buy
City of Djinns
by William Dalrymple
Dalrymple's 1993 account of a year living in Delhi — exploring the city's layers of history from the Mughals to the British to the present — is the closest companion to Maximum City in the genre of the returning or arriving outsider writing a total portrait of an Indian city, though Mehta's Bombay is the more complex and the more electric city.
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