Narcopolis
Written by Jeet Thayil
- Shortlisted
- The Man Booker Prize 2012
- Published by Faber & Faber
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Jeet Thayil’s fabulous trip into Bombay’s sprawling underworld, a perilous realm with an exotic cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs
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. 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, the invisible poor. In this broken city, there are too many to count.
Jeet Thayil
Jeet Thayil has published four collections of poetry and his novel Narcopolis was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012
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