Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012
Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay: In Rashid's opium room a young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame as men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. In Shuklaji Street they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. But then whispers build of a new terror, something that shifts the tenuous balance of survival for the city's nameless, invisible poor.
A rich, hallucinatory dream of a novel, Narcopolis captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, and gangsters, it is a lyrical and unforgettable journey into a sprawling underworld.
©2012 Jeet Thavil (P)2012 Canongate Books Ltd in partnership with Faber and Faber Ltd