Are publishers in India killing literature with formulaic fiction?

Lavanya Sankaran’s aptly named first novel The Hope Factory is the latest in formulaic fiction from the Subcontinent, says Devika Bakshi in Open.

The point at which a novel set in India resorts to the descriptive crutch of spices is usually the point at which I begin sliding into a familiar despair. In Lavanya Sankaran’s The Hope Factory, that point arrives—amid a flurry of other clichés—rather early, in the outrageously unoriginal sentence: ‘The air was redolent with spices.’ As a result, the majority of my relationship with the novel has been one of resistance—my resistance to reading it. I couldn’t get through it.