Kunal Basu (Bengali: কুনাল বসু; born 4 May 1956) is an Indian author of English fiction who has written five novels – The Opium Clerk (2001), The Miniaturist (2003), Racists (2006), The Yellow Emperor's Cure (2011) Kalkatta (2015) and Sarojini’s Mother (2020).

Born to Communist parents, he was brought up on books and enriching conversations at home that was visited by a galaxy of prominent men and women of the day.

During his SFI leadership, he carried out many protests, gherao (encirclement), class boycott, and roadblock and demonstration against Samrajjobadi (Imperialist) Western countries, especially against the United States of America.

But more than anything, he has said what draws him most to this genre is the "romantic possibilities of the historical novel",[citation needed] the scope to inhabit other places and times and thus enable the reader to romance the strange.

An unlikely hero, Hiran is caught up in rebellion and war, buffeted by storms at sea, by love and intrigue, innocently implicated in fraud and dark dealings.

To settle an argument that has raged inconclusively for decades, two scientists decide to raise a pair of infants, one black, one white, on a barren island, exposed to the dangers all around them, tended only by a young nurse whose muteness renders her incapable of influencing them in any way, for good or for bad.

Determined to find a cure, Antonio sets sail for Peking in the hope that traditional Chinese medicine has the answer that eludes the West.

Soon enough, innocent massage leads to 'plus plus treatments', and Kalkatta opens its doors, drawing Jami into the world of the rich and famous, housewives, tourists and travelling executives, and occasionally to high-paying and dangerous 'parties '.

Jami's shadowy double life takes a turn for the unexpected when he meets Pablo, a young boy who suffers from leukemia, and his single mother Mandira.

Made to oscillate between his refugee family, the neighbourhood gang, his massage-parlour clients, even the cultured world of Bengali intellectuals inhabited by Mandira, he succeeds in becoming a true Kalkattawallah, but a stranger to himself.

Handicapped by a missing shoebox that held her birth papers and the death of her English mother, she has few leads to carry out her mission and scant knowledge of Calcutta, her birthplace.

With Saz split in half, nothing is spared in the battle between the mothers, moving at a fast clip to the final throw of the dice as rivals await the result of DNA matching from their blood samples.

The pen-friends fall in love and exchange their vows over letters, then live as man and wife without ever setting eyes on each other, their intimacy of words tested finally by life's miraculous upheavals.

They are awkward when they meet... and they do things to each other which they hadn't quite planned... • Bairer Dorja, 2017 This novel was published by Sananda (a leading Bangla women's magazine) in their 2017 'Pujo-sankha' – their coveted annual Durga puja edition.