Narcopolis Av Jeet Thayil

<p><b>Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, <i>Narcopolis</i> is a rich and hallucinatory novel set around a Bombay opium den, as the city transforms itself over three decades.</b><br><br>In Old Bombay, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. But in Rashid''s opium room on Shuklaji Street, the air is thick with voices and ghosts. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. And now there is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. In broken Bombay, there are too many to count. <br><br>Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao''s China, <i>Narcopolis</i> 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.</p>