Now shorlisted for the Guardian First Book prize. The pure density of the work in many ways characterises the city it portrays in a very human story of the vast metropolis. The author grew up in Bombay, left, then returned 21 years later to look at it with fresh eyes. Through the lives of divers inhabitants, he illustrates an extraordinary and frightening place. A very impressive work.
Bombay's story, told through the lives, often desperately near the edge, of some of the people who live there. The complex texture of these extraordinary tales is threaded together by Suketu Mehta's own history of growing up in Bombay and returning to live there after a 21-year absence. Hitmen, dancing girls, cops, movie stars, poets, beggars and politicians - Suketu looked at the city through their eyes, and in looking found the city within himself.
Suketu Mehta is a fiction writer and journalist based in New York. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O.Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Granta, Harper's Magazine, Time and Conde Nast Traveler. Mehta also co-wrote Mission Kashmir, a Bollywood movie.
