The next time you want to pick up the Great Indian Novel, try looking in your neighbourhood American bookstore. But be warned... you will have a lot of titles to choose from.

You might find Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu on the shelf designated for the top 10 bestsellers, or Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace prominent in the 'new and recommended' display.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies -- still on the bestseller list in San Francisco and Boston over a year after its publication -- will greet you with a note on the cover telling you it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. While Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things will be comfortably stacked in the section of modern classics.

Then there are the newer writers gaining attention, including Vineeta Vijayaraghavan's Motherland.

If fiction doesn't interest you, there will be a number of Indian writers figuring prominently in other parts of the store. A number of Deepak Chopra's books, including How to Know God, loom large in the spirituality section.

C K Prahalad's books, including Competing for the Future, dominate the business section. And Robin Sharma's The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari will entice you to buy his motivation material, like so many Americans and Canadians have.

A few months ago, Akhil Sharma entered this foray of acclaimed Indian writers with his novel, An Obedient Father. It took the top prize in this year's Ernest Hemmingway Foundation/PEN Awards and now Sharma is competing with fellow finalist, Pankaj Mishra, (author of The Romantics), for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction given annually by the Los Angeles Times.

"It was very deserved," Jonathan Galassi, editor-in-chief of the New York publishing house Farrar Straus and Giroux, said of Sharma's PEN award. "I thought it was one of the best books we published last year."

Sharma, a 29-year-old investment banker originally from New Delhi, will receive the $7,500 prize along with the award. His novel is about the ill doings of Ram Karan, a corrupt bureaucrat for India's Congress Party, ending with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Another South Asian writer, Mohsin Hamid, was a finalist in the competition for Moth Smoke, his novel about modern Pakistan.

Galassi praised Sharma in The Boston Globe for "the strength of his writing and his emotional and intellectual power." "Sharma is an extraordinarily gifted writer," he later told rediff.com

The editor felt that though Sharma's novel did not receive much attention when it was originally published, the award would help when a paperback edition will be published later this year. The hardcover has sold under 30,000 copies. It will also be important to Sharma's career, he said, and how his future books will be received.

To Galassi, the award signified an overall trend he has observed in literature produced by Indians. "There is an awful lot of good writing being done in India or by Indian authors," he said. "I've observed this strong narrative tradition in books done by Indian authors, and people seem to follow their approach. Readers appreciate it, that Indian authors are not afraid to tell stories."

This tradition may explain their success in the North American market, he said. "The success of books is not so much due to what they are about, but how they are told," he said. "Certainly, there are many Indian writers who know how to tell stories -- Roy, Mistry, Ghosh, Suri, Pankaj Mishra, and of course, Sharma."

And while Galassi said he didn't know enough about Indian literary traditions to comment on what influence it has on today's writers, he said that in the last 20 years "a lot of writers from the subcontinent have made a big impact here".

"Just remember, if you think about how many English speakers are there in the world, and what percentage of them live in India, the number of good writers to be found there is not surprising at all," he said.

In April, bookshelves will add the newest title from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, a collection of short stories.

And shortly afterwards, Anita Desai, her daughter Kiran, Bharti Kirchner and Shani Mootoo will have their new novels in.

Or you might just want to wait for another year to see if Lahiri will write her version of the Great Indian Novel.

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