Mahajan's first novel, Family Planning, was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "Brave, breakneck, and amusing"';[10] in The Seattle Times as "Pleasurably crazed";[11] and in the Washington Post as "Genuinely funny" and "Profound".[12] Author Suketu Mehta described it as "The truest portrait of modern New Delhi I've read, and the funniest book of the year",[13] and novelist Jay McInerney called it "one of the best and funniest first novels I've read in years."[14]
Family Planning was published by the Harper Perennial imprint of HarperCollins, and released in the US in 2008 and the UK in 2009, with translations forthcoming in India, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Brazil, and Korea.
The Association of Small Bombs
Mahajan's second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, about the bombing of a Delhi market, was released to widespread acclaim in 2016, with laudatory reviews appearing in The New Yorker,[15] The New York Times Book Review,[16] and The Washington Post.[17] The judges of the National Book Award for Fiction described the novel as an "epic tableau drawn by the instruments of empathy, an illuminating human expedition from India to America and back, a story that burns straight through you—incandescent, absorbing, engrossing—a novel of hope and despair, love and rage, today and tomorrow.[18]" The New York Times named the novel one of its "10 Best Books of 2016."
