This book is one of the best sci-fi satires I have read. It was written ten years before The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is known to have inspired Douglas Adams.
I love escaping into worlds where the line between reality and illusion is unclear. I also enjoy clever writing. So, this book was perfect for me. The novel is all about random lotteries, mistaken identities, mistakes made in a dimension where there are no mistakes, intergalactic bureaucracy, gods and their articulate failings, companies engineering the universe, world-hopping, ‘eat-or-be-eaten’ situations, racism among dinosaurs, cities that are nagging wives, corporate dystopias, the art of waste mismanagement, and then finally living in the moment.
The book is as thought-provoking as it’s thrilling and funny.
'Hilarious SF satire. Douglas Adams said it was the only thing like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, although written ten years earlier. It's wonderful' Neil Gaiman
This madcap cosmic farce relates the adventures of the hapless human Carmody, as he attempts to make his way home to Earth after winning the grand prize in the Intergalactic Sweepstake, encountering parallel worlds, incompetent bureaucrats and talking dinosaurs on the way.
'The greatest entertainer ever produced by science fiction ... a feast of wit and intelligence' J. G. Ballard
I read this novel soon after returning from Wales where I was visiting on a writing fellowship. My experience of the country is contemporary while the book is set several decades in the past. But I found the references and nuances of life, society, politics, language, and religion familiar.
It is a beautiful study of realistic rural life without romanticizing it. Spanning nearly four generations and panning wide to take in the entire neighbourhood, it depicts history as lived experience. Be it late 21st century India or early 20th century Wales, ‘upended’ power dynamics in marriages in historically hierarchical societies lead to tragic, albeit interesting, stories whose impact continues to be felt many generations on. While this is the underlying theme of the story, the narrative doesn’t seek to educate. It simply paints an intricate and highly enjoyable picture.
On the Black Hill is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century.
In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.
This is a very interesting novel, which is a deep reflection on human life that is told at the pace of a thriller.
It is set in the decade after the COVID pandemic, not so far into the future where fantasy takes over and not so close to the present where our senses are too dulled from the exigencies of reality and its aftermath. It is a futuristic espionage story that is highly literary in its narration.
Not many Indian authors come to mind who aren’t entirely obsessed with questions of identity and its politics in their writing – who put down the rear-view mirror and draw from the known world and beyond to write so engagingly. We need good speculative fiction because, having come face-to-face with the dramatic ways in which uncertainty poses itself, speculation is the only constant. This novel is another fresh, surprising addition to the author’s versatile list.
A novel of suspense and intrigue set in the post-pandemic world
Harris Maloub, a killer with an erased official past, now in his fifties, is visited by someone who could not be alive and given an assignment. In Aarhus, Denmark, Jens Erik, police officer on pre-retirement leave, somehow cannot forget the body of a Black man recovered from the sea some years ago. On an abandoned oil rig in the North Sea, turned into a resort for the very rich, Michelle, a young Caribbean woman, realizes that the man she has followed to this job is not what he claims…
A family drama set in Karnataka that parallels the Indian freedom movement.
It is 1857, the year of the ‘sepoy mutiny.’ Two brothers, emissaries of a northern king, on a mission to garner the support of the southern rulers, are lost in a forest not far from their destination. One of them is captured and hung by the British. Caught in the rough and tumble of the mutiny, the other brother settles down in a place that was never meant to be more than a temporary refuge.
The novel spans the story of three generations of his family living under the burden of inherited nostalgia, a story that unfolds with all its flying fancies and stumbling follies on the threshold between tradition and modernity.
