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While some readers interpreted the collection's final story, "Swimming Lessons," as a forerunner to future fiction about the immigrant experience, their expectations fell short when Mistry's first novel, Such a Long Journey, appeared in 1991. This complex tale of corruption during Indira Gandhi's years in office returns once more to the Bombay Parsi community. For a debut novel, it brought the author rare attention, first as a winner of the Governor-General's Award of Canada and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, then as an entry on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. He published his second novel, A Fine Balance, in 1995. It again reached the shortlist for the Booker Prize and received various awards. Like its predecessor, A Fine Balance treats India both kindly and harshly. Set in the mid-1970s during Mrs. Gandhi's declaration of a state of internal emergency, the book turns first toward the Parsi community in an unidentified city by the sea that resembles Bombay, but its plot opens up to embrace other characters and to expand the settings. .
Mistry as a writer has enjoyed an exceptional start. When he was asked by Geoff Hancock in 1989 how he reacted to reviews, he replied: "In all modesty, I must admit that so far, I have only received positive reviews. I haven't felt the sting of a bad review" (147). That phenomenon still holds generally true. Hancock continues to stress how well Mistry has done in such a short time and proposes, "Is writing a gift you have?" Mistry counters the question by asking "Is it a gift? Or a fortuitous confluence of events? Is it because Multiculturalism is fashionable?" (146). Asked about his "sense of audience," Mistry responds rather grandly, "I suppose the world is my audience," then qualifies the claim by adding "At least, I wish it" (146). To a degree, the English-speaking world has become his audience, even though the wide reception of Mistry's fiction set in the milieu of a minority religious community and focused on Indian political events does raise some questions.