King of Bollywood: Shahrukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema (Grand Central Publishing, 2007), by Anupama Chopra, belongs on the bookshelf of every Bollywood fan. The author is a journalist who has written about Bollywood since 1993 for publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Variety. In this excellently written and researched biography, Chopra looks at the entire Hindi film industry through the prism of its biggest star, Shahrukh Khan, who is often called the Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt of India. (Although to be fair, Khan outdraws both those actors combined.) The book chronicles the legend of his meteoric rise and fanatical following and explores the fascinating cinematic world over which he presides.

Stephen Alter is an American writer who grew up in India and the cousin of one of the few Western actors in Bollywood, Tom Alter. In Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Filmmaking (Harvest Books, 2007), he gives a firsthand account of the making of Omkara (2006), a brilliant Hindi adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. Alter takes readers onto closed sets where he shadows the cast and crew, all the while explaining the cultural and industry context in which Bollywood films are made.

Dreaming in Hindi (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), by Katherine Russell Rich, isn’t about Bollywood, but it’s a memoir about learning the language of Bollywood, and Rich ends up falling in love with the movies as a result of her studies. “Hindi films were unendurable…till something clicked and I became a convert,” she writes. “Punch for punch, I saw, you couldn’t beat them for high drama. In one we’d watched, there was an illicit pregnancy, a hinted-at abortion, a suicide, a wedding, and repeated shooting of a groom on horseback, all before the opening credits. The film demonstrates what Shakespeare could have done had he had access to automatic rifles.” Anyone who has watched numerous Bollywood movies and picked up enough Hindi words to toy with the idea of learning the language will enjoy the tale of Rich’s difficult and meaningful journey to fluency.

Sacred Games (Harper Perennial, 2007), by Vikram Chandra, is a riveting epic (nearly 1,000 pages long) about the Mumbai underworld—specifically a mob boss, the police detective who’s trying to catch him, the Bollywood star who sleeps with him, and an assortment of spies, terrorists, and religious nuts. The author spent seven years researching and writing the book, and it was well worth the effort—the result is a gritty, poignant, frightening masterpiece of grandiose proportions.

Vikas Swarup, the author of the novel Q&A—on which the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire was based—has penned a clever second novel, Six Suspects (Minotaur Books, 2009). While Q&A was called a Dickensian tale, Six Suspects smacks of an Agatha Christie murder mystery—and one of the suspects is a Bollywood starlet with a big secret. Her story and that of the dumb Texan who loves her are the best of the bunch. The others include an ambitious politician, a mobile-phone thief, a tribesman trying to recover a sacred stone, and a corrupt bureaucrat who thinks he’s possessed by Gandhi. This witty whodunit is too entertaining to wait for the film adaptation.