Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Written in poetic and affecting prose, Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel charts the evolution of a great and broken metropolis across three decades. A rich, hallucinatory dream that captures Bombay in all its compelling squalor, Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. It is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent's familiar literary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul.

Narcopolis: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Thayil, Jeet

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Publishing Group

Wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my...    Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. Here, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. In the broken city, there are too many to count.     Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao's China, it portrays a city in collision with itself. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.

Narcopolis

Genre Fiction

Faber&Faber

The Book of Chocolate Saints follows the unforgettable character Xavier and his journey towards salvation - or damnation - or perhaps both. In the swooningly hypnotic prose for which his Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel was acclaimed, Jeet Thayil paints a hallucinatory portrait of an ambiguous soul: a self-destructive figure, a charismatic contrarian, and a tortured damned artist battling with his conflicting instincts. Vividly set in both Delhi and Manhattan, The Book of Chocolate Saints explores our deepest urges in a novel that is sexy, dangerous, and entirely uncompromising. This is intoxicating, blazingly intelligent literary fiction that will consolidate Jeet Thayil's reputation as one of the most promising writers of his generation.

The Book of Chocolate Saints

Literary

Ullis went to the bathroom and carefully unfolded the business card and placed it on the sink. Then he rolled up a note and snorted the last of his wife’s ashes. When Ullis discovers that his wife Aki has committed suicide, he escapes to Bombay with a bag of drugs for one final party. On the plane, he finds himself sitting by a glamorous society lady called Payal, and a friendship of sorts blooms into life. Over the coming days they embark on a whirlwind of self-destructive misadventures as Ullis attempts to mask his grief through excessive narcotics, resulting in episodes of increasing dysfunctionality that flirt with total self-obliteration - and perhaps a kind of resolution.

Humor & Satire

Ullis went to the bathroom and carefully unfolded the business card and placed it on the sink. Then he rolled up a note and snorted the last of his wife's ashes.\nFollowing the death of his wife, Dominic Ullis escapes to Bombay in search of oblivion and a dangerous new drug, Meow Meow. So begins a glorious weekend of misadventure as he tours the teeming, kaleidoscopic city from its sleek eyries of high-capital to the -stained streets, encountering a cast with their own stories to tell, but none of whom Ullis - his faculties ever distorted - is quite sure he can trust.\nHeady, heartbroken and heartfelt, Low is a blazing joyride through the darklands of grief towards obliteration - and, perhaps, epiphany.\n'Jeet Thayil delights not just in pushing the bounds of possibility, but in smashing them to smithereens.' John Burnside

Jeet Thayil has compiled the definitive anthology of Indian poetry in English. This monumental undertaking, two decades in the making, brings together writers from across the world, a wealth of voices--in dialogue, in soliloquy, in rhetoric, and in play--to present an expansive, encompassing idea of what makes an 'Indian' poet. Included are lost, uncollected, or out of print poems by major poets, essays that place entire bodies of work into their precise cultural contexts, and a collection of classic black and white portraits by Madhu Kapparath. These images, taken over a period of thirty years, form an archive of breathtaking historical scope. They offer the viewer unparalleled intimacy and access to the lives of some of India's greatest poets.

The Penguin Book of Indian Poets

Poetry

PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE INDIA PVT.LTD.

English + Apocalypso Flipbook

Self-Help

Relationships

India Hamish Hamilton

Manu Parekh has executed a series of paintings inspired by the city. In turn, this book is a collection of the essays by seven writers who have been inspired by his work in this series.

Manu Parekh's Banaras: Eternity Watches Time

Arts & Photography

De, Aditi

Hoskote, MR Ranjit

Menezes, Meera

Osborne, MR Peter

Rushton, Ms Marilyn

Vajpeyi, Ashok

Berry, Tanuj

History & Criticism

Lund Humphries

Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel completely subvertsand challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel iscelebrated. This is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction,love, and god, and has more in common in its subject matter with the work ofWilliam S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with the subcontinent's familiarliterary lights. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful anddamned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. Written in Thayil'spoetic and affecting prose, Narcopolis charts the evolution of a great andbroken metropolis. Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the late 1970s, as itsnarrator first arrives from New York to find himself entranced with the city'sunderworld, in particular an opium den and attached brothel. A cast ofunforgettably degenerate and magnetic characters works and patronizes thevenue, including Dimple, the eunuch who makes pipes in the den; Rumi, thesalaryman and husband whose addiction is violence; Newton Xavier, thecelebrated painter who both rejects and craves adulation; Mr. Lee, the Chineserefugee and businessman; and a cast of poets, prostitutes, pimps, andgangsters.Decades pass to reveal a changing Bombay, where opium hasgiven way to heroin from Pakistan and the city's underbelly has become everrawer. Those in their circle still use sex for their primary release andrecreation, but the violence of the city on the nod and its purveyors havemoved from the fringes to the center of their lives. Yet Dimple, despite thebleakness of her surroundings, continues to search for beauty—at the movies, inpulp magazines, at church, and in a new burka-wearing identity.After a long absence, the narrator returns in 2004 tofind a very different Bombay. Those he knew are almost all gone, but thepassion he feels for them and for the city is revealed.

Tantor Audio

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