A thoughtful book, laden with insight, at the ways in which a new India is being written and read.

Namita Gokhale, Writer, publisher and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival

Reading New India provides a much needed and timely introduction to postmillennial India and Indian English literature within India as they move beyond the postcolonial past and forward into 'Newness'.

Transnational Literature

The splendor and the misery of Reading New India is that it whets the appetite for the fiction it introduces but necessarily fails to satiate the appetite thus awakened.

LSE Review of Books

Varughese's book is a gift for academics teaching Indian writing in English. And perhaps it will outshine all other books in the 'academic' library with its lively and pulpy, Karan Joharesque cover of bright yellow and pink.

The Book Review India

This is an ambitious and novel project, strenuous though, considering the vast body of literature to be considered. And [Dawson] has done it with a sense of academic objectivity. Reading New India: Post-Millennial Fiction in English - "the first book to focus on fiction at the millennium, the crossroad for India's globalisation" - is not a critique or a collection of reviews of individual novels or a generalised assessment of the oeuvre of individual writers, but a representation of various trends, themes, motifs, lineaments, zeitgeist, dynamic & conflicting cultural mores & values informing the fiction in hand, and an analysis of the core themes of some of the individual typical novels written in different voices.

The Hans India

The book is racy, giving you a smooth ride peppered with Indian exotica. You can't stop once you hold it in hands. It is a thorough work in itself. And who says, you get to know a place by reading its history and sociology only. Varughese fulfills it through her literary sojourn as well in an impeccable manner. Besides literary archives, you could place it in tourism section also to show the new rising India, in a big stroke.

Zafar Anjum, Kitaab Review