Half Girlfriend

Half Girlfriend is a novel by the Indian writer Chetan Bhagat, published in 2014. It is his sixth novel and has been published in Hindi and Gujarati as well as in English.

Madhav Jha is a rural boy from Dumraon, a village in Bihar, and the book follows him as he enrols at the English-medium St. Stephen's College in New Delhi, where the language and the habits of the students around him are constant obstacles. There he falls in love with a wealthy Delhi girl educated at the Modern School. She does not want the relationship acknowledged, but she agrees to be what she calls his half girlfriend.

The title comes from that arrangement, which Bhagat has described as a familiar situation in India, where a boy may believe he means more to a girl than a friend while she does not consider him her boyfriend. The story is set in rural Bihar, New Delhi, Patna and New York, and it follows him through the years he spends trying to win her over.