Narcopolis

Author: Jeet Thayil

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 29.99 AUD
  • : 9780571275762
  • : United Book Distributors
  • : United Book Distributors
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  • : 0.415
  • : December 2010
  • : 234mm X 153mm X 22mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 32.99
  • : December 2011
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Jeet Thayil
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  • : Paperback
  • : 212
  • :
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  • : 823.92
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  • :
  • : 304
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Barcode 9780571275762
9780571275762

Description

A rich and hallucinatory novel, set around a Bombay opium den, that follows a fascinating cast of flawed characters as the city transforms itself over three decades.


Wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my...


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. Here, 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, invisible poor. In the broken city, there are too many to count.


Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao's China, it portrays a city in collision with itself. 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.

Awards

Man Booker Shortlist 2012

Author description

Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala, India, in 1959 and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Mumbai. He is a performance poet, songwriter and guitarist as well as a writer and has published four collections of poetry. He is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). He currently lives in Bangalore.