‘One of the finest novels that most of us will ever read.’ (Irish Times)
Rohinton Mistry’s third gripping novel is both a domestic drama and an intently observed portrait of present-day Bombay in all its vitality and corruption. At the age of seventy-nine, Nariman Vakeel, already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, breaks an ankle and finds himself wholly dependent on his family.
Grappling with memories of the past and interpretations best left to the future, the novel turns Dickensian in scope halfway through, with elements of poverty, illness, inequality within the same family, politics and government- all influencing the daily life. It also brings forth the deplorable way in which we treat the notions of old age, thereby leaving our elders to fend for themselves.
“Whereas Salman Rushdie’s celebrated ‘Midnight’s Children’ gave us Bombay with a headlong, fantastic, word-twirling magic realism, Mistry harks back to the nineteenth-century novelists, for whom every detail, every urban alley, every character however lowly added a vital piece to the full social picture, and for whom every incident illustrated the eventually crushing weight of the world…” New Yorker Review
