Search results for ""Author Rana Dasgupta""

'A terrific portrait of Delhi right now' SALMAN RUSHDIE'An astonishing tour de force by a major writer at the peak of his powers' WILLIAM DALRYMPLEWINNER OF THE PRIX ÉMILE GUIMET DE LITTÉRATURE ASIATIQUE 2017WINNER OF THE RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI AWARD 2017SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2015SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2015SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER 2016When Rana Dasgupta arrived in Delhi at the turn of the twenty-first century, he had no intention of staying for long, but the city beguiled him - he 'fell in love and in hate with it' - and fifteen years later, Delhi is still his home.Over these fifteen years, he has watched as the tumult of destruction and creation which accompanies India's economic boom transformed the face of the city. In Capital, he explores the life-changing consequences for Delhi's people, meeting with billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts. These encounters, interwoven with over a century of history, plunge us into Delhi's intoxicating, sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation - one that has repercussions not only for India, but for everybody's future.

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Winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. The new novel from the critically acclaimed author of Tokyo Cancelled. ‘Solo’ recounts the life and daydreams of a reclusive one-hundred-year-old man from Bulgaria. Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way. Wondering if, unlike the hapless parrots, he has any wisdom to leave to the world, Ulrich embarks on an epic armchair journey through a century of violent politics, forbidden music, lost love and failed chemistry, finding his way eventually to an astonishing epiphany of tenderness and enlightenment.

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A major international debut novel from a storyteller who couples a timelessly beguiling style with an energetically modern worldscape. Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell each other stories. Robert De Niro's lovechild explores the magical properties of a packet of Oreos; a Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; a man who edits other people's memories has to confront his own past; a Chinese youth with amazing luck cuts men's hair and cleans their ears; an entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left all alone in the house of a German cartographer. Told by people on a journey, these are stories about lives in transit. Stories from the great cities – New York, Istanbul, Delhi, Lagos, Paris, Buenos Aires – that grow into a novel about the hopes and dreams and disappointments that connect people everywhere. Dasgupta's writing is utterly distinctive and fresh, so striking that it seems to come from the future and the past all at once, but in marrying a timeless mystery to an alert modernity, his cautionary tales manage to be reminiscent of both Ballard and Borges, depicting ordinary extraordinary individuals (some lost, some confused, some happy) in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, wonderful.

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