| Author(s) | Books/Works | Notes |
| A.G.Krishnamurthy | Dhirubaism | - |
| A.K. Ramanujan | The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan | This book, which was being taught in Delhi University, contains an essay which allegedly describes a version of Ramayana in which Rama and Sita were siblings. Following a court case, an expert panel was formed to look into the matter. Though the panel voted for the retention of the essay, the University dropped it from the course in 2011. |
| Abul Fazl | Akbarnama | Official chronicle of the reign of Akbar. It was commissioned by Akbar himself. |
| Abul Fazl | Ain-i-Akbari | - |
| Adam Smith | The Wealth of Nations | Magnum Opus (Greatest work) of Adam Smith. One of world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations’ wealth. |
| Adolf Hitler | Mein Kampf | Autobiographical manifesto of Adolf Hitler. Published in two volumes (in 1925 and 1926) |
| Agatha Christie | And Then There Were None | Widely considered to be the fifth largest selling book of all time |
| Al Gore | The Assault on Reason | - |
| Al Gore | An Inconvenient Truth | Published concurrently with the documentary by the same name in 2006. Sequel to this book is ‘Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis’ |
| Albert Camus | The Outsider; The Plague; The Rebel; Ideas and Opinions | The Outsider tops the Le Monde’s (a Paris newspaper) 100 Books of the Century list. Camus was also awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature. |
| Alec Guinness | Blessing in Disguise | - |
| Alexander Dumas | The Three Musketeers | - |
| Ali Smith | The Accidental | - |
| Alice Walker | The Colour Purple | - |
| Amartya Sen | The Argumentative Indian | - |
| Amis Martin | Experience | - |
| Amrita Pritam | Death of a City; 49 days; Pinjar | Popular writer Khushwant Singh translated Pinjar into English. It wasrelso adapted into a movie by the same name in 2003. |
| Anant Pai | Amar Chitra Katha (comic book series); Tinkle | Anant Pai was also known as ‘Uncle Pai’ |
| Anna Sewell | Black Beauty | - |
| Anne Enright | The Gathering | - |
| Anne Frank | The Diary of Anne Frank | Written by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands |
| Anthony West | Heritage | - |
| A.P.J. Abdul Kalam | Ignited Minds; Wings of Fire | - |
| Aravind Adiga | The White Tiger; Between the Assassinations | The White Tiger is the winner of 40th Man Booker Prize |
| Aristotle | Poetics | - |
| Arnold Toynbee | A Study of History; Mankind and Mother Earth | - |
| Arthur C Clarke | Rendezvous with Rama; Astounding Days | - |
| Arthur Conan Doyle | Sherlock Holmes Series | Dr Joseph Bell, a Scottish lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, was the inspiration for the fictional character Sherlock Holmes |
| Arun Shourie | The Parliamentary System | - |
| Arundhati Roy | The Algebra of Infinite Justice; The God of Small Things | The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997 |
| Babur | Baburnama | - |
| Banabhatta | Harshacharita; Kadambari | Harshacharitra is the biography of King Harsha Vardhana. Kadambari is one of the earliest published novels in the world |
| Bankim Chandra | Durgeshnandini; Anandmath; Rajsingha; Kapalkundala | - |
| Barack Obama | Dreams from My Father | - |
| Benazir Bhutto | Reconciliation - Islam, Democracy and the West; Pakistan: The Gathering Storm, Daughter of the East | - |
| Bertrand Russell | Analysis of Mind; Principia Mathematica | - |
| Bill Clinton | My Life | For this book, Clinton had received what was at that time world’s highest book advance fees |
| Bill Cosby | Time Flies | - |
| Bill Gates | Business @ the Speed of Thought; The Road Ahead | - |
| Bimal Jalan | The Future of India | - |
| Boris Becker | Boris Becker | - |
| Brian Lara | Beating the Field | - |
| Brinda Charry | Naked In the Wind | - |
| C.K. Prahalad | The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid; The New Age of Innovation | - |
| C.S. Lewis | The Chronicles of Narnia | Series of seven high fantasy novels |
| Chanakya | Arthashastra | Written under the pseudonym ‘Kautilya’ and ‘Vishnugupta’, both names traditionally identified with Chanakya |
| Charles Darwin | On the Origin of Species; Descent of Man | On the Origin of Species is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology |
| Charles de Gaulle | Memories of Hope | - |
| Charles Dickens | A Tale of Two Cities | Often considered to be the bestselling book of all time |
| Charlie Chaplin | My Autobiography | - |
| Chinua Achebe | Arrow of God; Things Fall Apart | Things Fall Apart is the most widely read book in modern African literature |
| D.B.C. Pierre | Vernon God Little | - |
| D.H. Lawrence | Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Sons and Lovers; Woman in Love | An Indian bookseller (Ranjit Udeshi) was prosecuted for selling Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The Supreme Court in this case declared the law on the subject of when a book can be regarded as obscene. |
| Dan Brown | The Da Vinci Code; Angels and Demons | Both the books have been converted into high grossing movies. The Da Vinci Code was banned in Nagaland for allegedly containing blasphemous remarks about Jesus |
| Dante Aligheri | Divine Comedy | - |
| David Davidar | The House of Blue Mangoes; The Solitude of Emperors | - |
| Dinabandhu Mitra | Nil - Darpana | - |
| Donald Trump | How To Get Rich; Think Like a Billionaire | - |
| Edmund Burke | Reflections on the French Revolution | - |
| Eric Segal | Love Story | Interestingly, former Vice-President of United States Al Gore has always stated that this book is based on his life at Harvard, though Eric Segal clarified in 1997 that it is actually based on Gore’s roommate’s life! |
| Ernest Hemingway | For Whom the Bell Tolls; Garden of Eden; The Old Man and the Sea; A Farewell to Arms | Hemingway also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in the year 1954 |
| Franklin Miles | My Brilliant Career | - |
| Frederick Douglass | Narrative of the Life of an American Slave | - |
| Gabriel Garcia Marquez | One Hundred Years of Solitude | - |
| Geoffrey Chaucher | The Canterbury Tales | - |
| George Eliot | Mill on the Floss | - |
| George Orwell | Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty Four | Nineteen Eighty Four is one of the most critically acclaimed novels of all time and words such as Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak, 2 + 2 = 5 entered everyday use after its publication in 1949 |
| Gore Vidal | Creation | - |
| Gregory David Roberts | Shantaram | - |
| Gurucharan Das | India Unbound | A largely accurate account of India’s economic journey after its independence |
| Gustav Flaubert | Madam Bovary; A Simple Soul | - |
| Guy de Maupassant | A Woman’s Life; The Necklace | - |
| H.S. Wells | Invisible Man | - |
| H.S. Vatsyayan | A Sense of Time Time | - |
| H.G. Wells | Machine | Generally credited with popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively |
| Hanif Kureishi | Something To Tell You; Intimacy | - |
| Harold Evans | Good Times; Bad Times | - |
| Harper Lee | To Kill a Mocking Bird | Won Pulitzer Prize (1961). Topped the ‘Books to read before you die’ list released by British librarians, even ahead of The Bible |
| Helen Keller | The Story of My Life | - |
| Henry Fielding | Tom Jones | - |
| Henry Kissinger | Diplomacy; Years of Upheaval | - |
| Herman Hesse | Siddhartha | - |
| Homer | The llliad; The Odyssey | - |
| llija Trojanow | Along the Ganga | - |
| Immanuel Kant | A Critique of Pure Reason | One of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Followed by ‘Critique of Practical Reason’ and ‘Critique of Judgment’ |
| Indira Gandhi | My Truth | - |
| Iris Murdoch | The Good Apprentice | - |
| Irving Stone | Passions of the Mind; The Agony and the Ecstasy | - |
| J.D. Salinger | The Catcher in the Rye | Most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States between 1961 and 1972. Ironically, in 1981, it was the ‘most censored book’ and ‘second most taught book’ in public schools at the same time! Novel’s protagonist Holden Caulfield has become an icon for teenage rebellion |
| J.M. Barrie | Peter Pan | - |
| J.R.R. Tolkien | The Hobbit; The Lord of the Rings; The Silmarillion | With over 150 million copies sold, The Lord of the Rings is the second best-selling novel ever written |
| James Herriot | All Things Bright and Beautiful | - |
| Jaswant Singh | A Call to Honour | - |
| Jay Mcinerney | The Story of My Life | - |
| Jay Prakash Narayan | Prison Diary | - |
| Jaydev | Geetgovinda | - |
| Jean Jacques Rousseau | Confessions; Emile | - |
| Jenny Donham | Before 1 Die | - |
| Jerome K Jerome | Three Men in a Boat | - |
| Jhumpa Lahiri | The Namesake; Interpreter of Maladies; Unaccustomed Earth | Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1999) and Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (2000). Also chosen as The New Yorker’s Best Debut of the Year award and is also on Oprah Winfrey’s Top Ten Book List. |
| Jim Corbett | Man-Eaters of Kumaon; Jungle Lore | The book Man-Eaters of Kumoun details the experiences that Corbett had in the Kumaon region of (now) Uttarakhand, where he was often called by the government to kill man-eating tigers |
| Jimmy Carter | The Hornet’s Nest | - |
| John Banville | The Sea | - |
| John Buchanan | If Better is Possible | - |
| John Bunyan | The Pilgrim’s Progress | - |
| John F Kennedy | Profiles in Courage | - |
| John Galsworthy | Man of Property; The Forsyth Saga | - |
| John Grisham | The Testament | - |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | The Affluent Society | - |
| John Milton | Lycidas | - |
| John Milton | Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained | - |
| John Osborne | Look Back In Anger | - |
| Jonathan Swift | Gulliver’s Travels | The word ‘Yahoo’, from which popular website yahoo.com’s name is derived was actually derived from the name of a character from Gulliver’s Travels |
| Joseph Lelyveld | Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India | The book is banned in the state of Gujarat |
| Julian Barnes | The Sense of an Ending | Winner of Man Booker Prize 2011 |
| Jung Chang | Wild Swans | - |
| K. Govindan Kutty | Seshan | - |
| K.P.S. Menon | Many Worlds | - |
| Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels | The Communist Manifesto | One of world’s most influential political manuscripts. It also briefly featured the ideas of Marx and Engels on how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism and eventually communism |
| Katherine Frank | Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi | - |
| Katherine Hepburn | Me | - |
| Katherine Mayo | Mother India | - |
| Khaled Hosseini | A Thousand Splendid Suns; The Kite Runner; And the Mountains Echoed | - |
| Kiran Desai | Hullabaloo in a Guava Orchard; The Inheritance of Loss | The Inheritance of Loss won Man Booker Prize 2006 |
| Kuldip Nayar | The Judgment | The book chronicles the state of India during the Emergency phase of the 1970s |
| Kunal Basu | The Miniaturist; Racists; The Opium Clerk | - |
| L.K. Advani | A Prisoner’s Scrapbook; My Country, My Life | My Country, My Life is the autobiographical account of L.K. Advani, a former Deputy Prime Minister of India |
| Lance Armstrong | Every Second Counts; It’s Not About the Bike | - |
| Lech Walesa | The Struggle and the Triumph; A Path of Hope | - |
| Lee lacocca | An Autobiography | - |
| Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace; Anna Karenina | Newsweek in 2009 ranked ‘War and Peace’ first in its list of the Top 100 Books of all time |
| Lewis Carroll | Looking Glass | - |
| Lord Byron | Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage | - |
| Lord Tennyson | In Memoriam | - |
| Luigi Priandello | Man, Beast, and Virtue | - |
| M.V. Karanth | India of our Dreams | - |
| Manohar Malgonkar | The Men Who Killed Gandhi | - |
| Marcel Proust | Remembrance of Things Past | - |
| Marco Polo | The Travels of Marco Polo | - |
| Margaret George | The Memoirs of Cleopatra | - |
| Margaret Mitchell | Gone with the Wind | Won Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 and was adapted into an Academy Award winning movie in 1939 |
| Margaret Thatcher | The Path to Power/The Downing Street Years | - |
| Marianne Pearl | A Mighty Heart | - |
| Mario Puzo | The Godfather | - |
| Mark Twain | Adventure of Tom Sawyer; Huckleberry Finn | - |
| Martina Navratilova | Being Myself | - |
| Mary Shelley | Frankenstein | - |
| Megasthenes | Indica | - |
| Michael Anderson | Experiments with Untruth | - |
| Michael Crichton | Jurassic Park | - |
| Mohsin Hamid | The Reluctant Fundamentalist | The film adaptation of this novel was released in 2012 and directed by noted film director Mira Nair |
| Nadine Gordimer | None of Accompany Me | - |
| Nandan Nilekani | Imagining India; Ideas for the New Century | - |
| Napoleon Hill | Think and Grow Rich | - |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | The Scarlet Letter | - |
| Nayantara Sehgal | A Voice for Freedom | - |
| Neal Donald Walsch | Conversations with God | - |
| Neel Mukherjee | Past Continuous | - |
| Nelson Mandela | Long Walk to Freedom; The Struggle is My Life | Long Walk to Freedom is the autobiographical work of Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa and noted anti-apartheid revolutionary |
| Neville Maxwell | India - China War | - |
| Nirad C. Chaudhuri | The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, A Passage to England | - |
| Oscar Wilde | The Picture of Dorian Gray | The only published novel of Oscar Wilde |
| P.M. Nair | The Kalam Effect | - |
| P.T. Usha | Golden Girl | - |
| Pablo Neruda | Residence on Earth; The Grapes and the Wind | - |
| Patrick White | The Eye of the Strom | - |
| Paulo Coelho | The Alchemist (O Alquimista); Brida;The Witch of Portbello | Originally written in Portuguese, The Alchemist has also set the Guinness World Record for most translated book by a living author |
| Pearl S Buck | The Patriot; Good Earth | - |
| Pele | My Life and the Beautiful Game | - |
| Percy Bysse Shelley | Adonis; Prometheus Unbound | - |
| Peter Ackroyd | The Life of Thomas More | - |
| Plato | Ethics; Republic | - |
| Preethi Nair | Gypsy Masala | - |
| R.K. Laxman | Laugh with Laxman | - |
| R.K. Narayan | Malgudi Days | - |
| Rajendra Prasad | India Divided | - |
| Rajmohan Gandhi | Mohandas | - |
| Rama Bijapurkar | We Are Like That Only | - |
| Ramachandra Guha | India After Gandhi | Chosen as Book of the Year by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and Outlook, and as Book of the Decade by The Times of India, The Times of London and The Hindu. Also won 2011 Sahitya Akademi Award for English |
| Randy Pausch | The Last Lecture | The book was born out of a lecture Pausch gave in 2007, named ‘Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams’ |
| Ravi Shankar | My Music, My Life | - |
| Richard Bach | Jonathan Livingston Seagull | - |
| Rhonda Byrne | The Secret | - |
| Richard Attenborough | In Search of Gandhi | Richard Attenborough is also the Academy-award winning Director of the movie ‘Gandhi’ |
| Roald Amundsen | The South Pole | Roald Amundsen was also the first person to reach the South Pole, in December 1911 |
| Roald Dahl | Charlie and the Chocolate Factory | - |
| Roberto Bolano | The Savage Detectives | - |
| Robin Sharma | Family Wisdom; Leadership Wisdom; The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari | - |
| Rohinton Mistry | A Fine Balance; Such A Long Journey; Tales from Firozshabag; Family Matters | Rohinton Mistry is an Indian born Canadian author who is also the winner of the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature |
| Romila Thapar | India - Another Millennium | - |
| Rudyard Kipling | The Jungle Book; Kim | - |
| Ruskin Bond | The Room on the Roof, Susanna’s Seven Husbands, The Blue Umbrella, The Flight of Pigeons | - |
| Ruth Prawer Jhabwala | Heat and Dust | - |
| S.E. Hinton | That Was Then, This is Now | - |
| S Radhakrishnan | An Idealist View of Life; Indian Philosophy | - |
| Salman Rushdie | Midnight’s Children; The Satanic Verses; Joseph Anton: A Memoir | Midnight’s Children won Booker Prize in 1981 and Booker of Bookers prize in 1993. The Satanic Verses is banned in India |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Kubla Khan; Rime of the Ancient Mariner | - |
| Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay | Devdas | Adapted into over a dozen movies till date |
| Sarojini Naidu | Broken Wing; Golden Threshold | - |
| Sheikh Mujibur Rahman | Friends and Foes | - |
| Shiv Khera | You Can Win | - |
| Shyam Bhatia | Benazir Bhutto | - |
| Sigmund Freud | The Interpretation of Dreams | - |
| Sir Aurobindo | Life Divine | - |
| Stanley Wolpert | Nine Hours to Rama | The book and the movie based on it, were both banned in India, as it apparently justified the actions of Nathuram Godse, who killed Gandhi |
| Stephen and Lucy Hawking | George’s Secret Key to the Universe | - |
| Steve Waugh | Steve Waugh | - |
| Sudha Murty | Mahasweta; The Old Man and His God | - |
| Tami Hoag | Dark Horse; Dust to Dust | - |
| Taslima Nasreen | Lajja | Following the publication of Lajja, Nasrin suffered a number of attacks, including physical attacks. The book is currently banned in Bangladesh |
| Tata Ali Baig | The Forbidden Sea | - |
| Thomas Carlyle | French Revolution | - |
| Thomas Moore | Utopia | - |
| Tom Holt | Olympiad | - |
| Tulsidas | Ramcharitmanas | Ramcharitmanas literally means ‘the lake of the deeds of Rama’ and was written in the 17th century |
| Umberto Eco | The Name of the Rose | - |
| V.N. Dutta | Gandhi and Bhagat Singh | - |
| Valmiki | Ramayana | - |
| Vatsayan | Kamasutra | |
| Ved Vyas | Mahabharata | |
| Voltaire | Candid; Zadig | - |
| William Dalrymple | City of Djinns; In Xanadu; The Last Mughal; White Mughals | - |
| William Shakespeare | Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet | - |
| William Styron | Darkness Visible | - |
| William Thackeray | Vanity Fair | - |
| Yann Martel | Life of Pi | Winner of Man Booker Prize 2002 |