Chetan Bhagat Books in Order

If you want his campus and early novels: Five Point Someone → One Night at the Call Center → The 3 Mistakes of My Life → 2 States.
If you like mystery and crime stories: The Girl in Room 105 → One Arranged Murder → 400 Days.
If you prefer love stories and relationship drama: 2 States → Half Girlfriend → One Indian Girl → 12 Years.
If you’re here for his non-fiction on India: What Young India Wants → Making India Awesome → India Positive.

Chetan Bhagat was born on 22 April 1974 in New Delhi in a middle-class Punjabi family. His father served in the Indian Army and his mother worked in a government department linked to agriculture, so talk of postings, policies and exams was part of everyday life. He studied at the Army Public School in Dhaula Kuan, where he gravitated toward maths, reading and making classmates laugh.

Like many ambitious students of his generation, he sat for India’s competitive entrance tests and went on to IIT Delhi to study mechanical engineering. After engineering, he joined IIM Ahmedabad for an MBA and was named the best outgoing student of his year. From there he stepped straight into investment banking, a high-pressure career that took him overseas.

Bhagat spent roughly eleven years in banking, much of it in Hong Kong, working long hours in fast-moving global firms. In the background, though, he kept scribbling scenes from hostel life and conversations with friends. Those fragments grew into his first novel, Five Point Someone, about three underperforming students at IIT and their struggle with a rigid system.

The book found an audience far beyond what he expected. Young readers passed it around hostels, offices and trains, seeing their own frustrations on the page. He followed it with One Night at the Call Center and The 3 Mistakes of My Life, drawing on settings like outsourced call centers and the coaching-and-cricket culture of small-town India. As these stories travelled and film adaptations appeared, he moved to Mumbai and, in 2009, left banking to write full time.

Since then he has written campus novels, love stories and thrillers, along with several non-fiction books. Novels like 2 States, Half Girlfriend, One Indian Girl, The Girl in Room 105, One Arranged Murder and 400 Days follow young Indians negotiating love, work and family pressure in a rapidly changing country. His non-fiction titles, including What Young India Wants, Making India Awesome and India Positive, tackle politics, inequality and everyday irritations in direct, conversational prose. More recently, with 12 Years: My Messed-up Love Story, he has returned to an urban romance built around the blurred lines of modern relationships.

Across genres, his work tends to be fast paced and rooted in the aspirations of English-speaking Indians in cities and small towns. He writes about engineering exams, call centers, coaching classes, investment banks and start-ups, but also about caste, religious tension, corruption and the pull of family. Rather than chasing literary experiments, his books aim to be easy to pick up even for first-time readers of English fiction.

That accessibility has made him one of the country’s most widely read authors.

Beyond books, Bhagat writes regular opinion columns for major English and Hindi newspapers, often arguing for better governance, jobs and education. He has co-written Hindi film screenplays, including adaptations of his own novels, and appears frequently as a motivational speaker, talking to students and corporate audiences about ambition, failure and reinvention. In recent years he has also built a presence on video and audio, hosting conversations on careers, creativity and current affairs.

He is married to Anusha, whom he met at IIM Ahmedabad, and their cross-cultural marriage helped inspire 2 States. The couple live in Mumbai with their twin sons, Shyam and Ishaan. Between writing sessions he balances family life with school events, travel for talks and the steady work of turning everyday Indian life into new stories.