Narcopolis - Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize
Age: Adult
Format: Paperback
Product Description
Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium.
Outside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.
Narcopolis is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. 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.
About Jeet Thayil
Jeet Thayil is an Indian novelist and poet. He has also written several collections of poems, including These Errors Are Correct, English, Apocalypso and Gemini.
The above title was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012, the Man Asian Literary Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize.