That's the cover of the new paperback edition of one of my favorite books from last year, "Sacred Games" by Vikram Chandra (click to magnify; a copy of the hardcover's cover can be been at the two links below). We covered the book extensively here on SAJAforum, including:
From the press release for the paperback below:
Hailed as “a work of masterfully crafted fiction,” by the San Diego Union-Tribune, and “monstrously entertaining,” by the Christian Science Monitor, Vikram Chandra’s SACRED GAMES (Harper Perennial; on sale: December 18, 2007; $16.95) is a work of astonishing scope and tremendous narrative depth that masterfully merges the literary sensibility of an epic 19th century novel with the framework of an intriguing detective story. In the mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic fictional mosaic he creates, Chandra brings to life the complex textures of daily life in modern India, pulsing with human ambition and desire, where wealth lives cheek by jowl with poverty, and a burgeoning underworld feeds off the growing, universal desire for possessions, influence, and domination.
Chandra is going to be doing another extensive tour and speaking in the Bay Area, LA, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and various cities in Texas, Colorado, Oregon. See full list below.
If you are interested in scheduling an interview with Chandra or receiving a journalist's review
copy of "Sacred Games," please contact Alberto Rojas, alberto.rojas[at]harpercollins.com - please note that he will only be able to respond to members of the working
press. Tell him SAJA sent you.
Chandra's essay on the story behind the book, the full press release, tour dates and more are below. Please post your comments, too.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Alberto G. Rojas
alberto.rojas[at]harpercollins.com
NATIONAL BESTSELLER IS NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK!
“SACRED GAMES combines the ambition of a 19th-century social novel with a cops-and-Bhais detective thriller…As sprawling as the heat-drenched city it richly portrays.”
— New York Times
“Monumental…Chandra brilliantly evokes a diverse slice of the population of Mumbai, a city that comes alive in SACRED GAMES in all its vibrant chaos.”
— Wall Street Journal
“Chandra…knows exactly when to break rules and when to follow them…[He] has a visual way with words that is a tremendous bonus to the reader as he places us in that overwhelming city…Chandra’s genius is in the way he trusts his reader.”
— Los Angeles Times
Hailed as “a work of masterfully crafted fiction,” by the San Diego Union-Tribune, and “monstrously entertaining,” by the Christian Science Monitor, Vikram Chandra’s SACRED GAMES (Harper Perennial; on sale: December 18, 2007; $16.95) is a work of astonishing scope and tremendous narrative depth that masterfully merges the literary sensibility of an epic 19th century novel with the framework of an intriguing detective story. In the mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic fictional mosaic he creates, Chandra brings to life the complex textures of daily life in modern India, pulsing with human ambition and desire, where wealth lives cheek by jowl with poverty, and a burgeoning underworld feeds off the growing, universal desire for possessions, influence, and domination.
Sartaj Singh – who first appeared in Chandra’s short story, “Kama” – is a skilled Sikh police inspector, cynical and reflective, yet hopeful. Divorced and approaching middle age, he immerses himself in his job with a zeal he disguises beneath a world-weary veneer. Amidst the swirling human bustle of Mumbai, the relatively ethical Sartaj seeks the truth he knows must lie beneath the vast layers of deceit that keep the city humming. Though no longer incorruptible, Sartaj tries to remain as decent and honorable as he can working within a system where kickbacks, extortion, and bribes are the order of the day.
One morning, Sartaj is stunned to receive an anonymous tip that the legendary mafia crime lord Ganesh Gaitonde is holed up in a nearby safe house. As Sartaj and his colleague, the constable Katekar, wait outside for backup, Gaitonde talks to Sartaj through the intercom of the bunker’s security system, telling the story of his rise to power from humble beginnings. Sartaj tries to keep the feared mafia don talking, but by the time he and Katekar get into the building, the notorious criminal has committed suicide and killed his female companion.
Expecting a routine investigation into Gaitonde’s suicide and the identity of the dead woman, the veteran cop is unprepared when his superiors inform him that the case will be overseen by the government’s top intelligence agency. Sartaj’s investigation leads him well beyond the morally ambiguous Mumbai he thinks he knows, as he navigates a complicated labyrinth of racial and religious intolerance, of fringe rebel groups and clandestine terrorist cells, and of an underworld mentality so pervasive that it has profoundly impacted the lives of ordinary Indian citizens.
As Sartaj’s unpredictable investigation unfolds, Ganesh Gaitonde tells his own singular story in alternating chapters. The mafia kingpin—who is a completely convincing narrator despite moments of self-delusion and unreliability-- recounts his ascendancy from an alienated rural childhood to a position of immense power and global reach. With remarkable candor, Gaitonde reveals himself to be a sensitive and sentimental man, qualities that belie his reputation for cold-blooded violence. Despite his public image of invincibility, he develops a needy attachment to a holy man, turning to his guru for counsel about every aspect of his life. Indeed, it is his dependency on the enigmatic “Guruji” that will lead to the convergence of his and Sartaj’s destinies.
Each of the characters in Chandra’s huge cast is drawn with an intimacy and compassion that brings even the secondary players – the boy from the corner shop who serves tea, the young girl with aspirations beyond society’s dictates, a Pakistani intelligence officer in London who knits for relaxation – to vivid life. In chapters he calls “Insets,” Chandra delves into the stories of some of the seemingly peripheral characters, putting a human face on moments in India’s often turbulent modern history, from the fierce schism wrought by the1948 Partition to terrorist activity in contemporary London. These episodes are among the most moving in the novel, illuminating as they do the twists of plot and development of character that make Vikram Chandra’s novel a literary masterpiece.
SACRED GAMES is an extraordinary achievement, it is both a hard-to-put-down story that envelops the reader and brings to life the sights, sounds, and smells of India’s mass of humanity with visceral intensity, and a work of great literary heft, that tackles global issues with lasting implications well beyond the subcontinent. Exciting, enriching, and indisputably profound, this literary tour de force firmly establishes Vikram Chandra as one of the finest novelists of our age.
# # #
Sacred Games
By Vikram Chandra
Harper Perennial
On Sale: December 18, 2007
ISBN: 0061130362 /Price: $16.95
o o o o o
TOUR FOR:
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
THURSDAY JANUARY 10, SAN FRANCISCO CA.
Capitola Book Café
@ 7:30 pm, 1475 41st Ave.
MONDAY, JANUARY 14, BOULDER CO.
Boulder Bookstore
@ 7:30 pm, 1107 Pearl St.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16, LOS ANGELES CA.
Borders Books & Music
@ 7:00 pm, 1360
Westwood Blvd.
THURSDAY JANUARY 17 SAN DIEGO CA.
Warwick’s Book Store
@ 7:30 pm, 7812 Girard Ave.
SUNDAY JANUARY 20, AUSTIN TX.
BookPeople
@ 3:00 pm, 603 N. Lamar
MONDAY JANUARY 21, HOUSTON TX.
Inprint Houston
@ 7:30 pm, 1520 W. Main
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 23, BERKELEY CA.
Moe’s Bookstore
@7:30 pm, 2476 Telegraph Ave.
MONDAY FEBRUARY 4, SAN FRANCISCO
Book Passage
@ 7:30 pm, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
TUESDAY FEBRUARY 5, SAN FRANCISCO
Orinda Books
@ 4:00pm, 276 Village Sq.
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 10, WASHINGTON D.C.
Politics & Prose
@ 5:00 pm, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW
MONDAY FEBRUARY 11, WASHINGTON D.C.
Library of Congress
@ 12:00 pm, Pickford Theater, 101 Independence Ave.SE
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 15, MILPITA CA.
India Community Center
@ 525 Las Coches St.
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 22, PORTLAND OR.
Powell’s Bookstore
@ 7:30 pm, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd.
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 23, BEND OR.
Sunriver Books
and Music
@ 5:00 pm, 57060
Abbot Dr.
o o o o o
"Only Life Itself": Vikram Chandra on the Story Behind the Book
After I had finished the stories in Love and Longing in Bombay, I
still had the sense that I had unfinished business with the character
Sartaj Singh. I had met several police officers in Bombay while I was
writing the short story “Kama,” and had become friendly with some of
them. I found myself still asking them questions and listening to their
stories, especially the ones about the city’s burgeoning underworld. I
added these stories to the tales I had heard as a child about legendary
gangsters like Haji Mastaan and Yusuf Patel. And late one afternoon, my
father and I were driving back to the suburb we lived in at the time.
The car stopped in the middle of an enormous traffic jam, and then we
heard the unmistakable booming of automatic weapons echoing back and
forth between the buildings. The word spread from car to car: the
police had cornered some bhais—gangsters—in an apartment building
around the corner. We listened to the firing, and read about it in the
paper the next morning. A few months later, an acquaintance of mine was
fired at and wounded by extortionists. He survived, but just barely.
Then someone else I knew was shot at as he was getting into his car. He
escaped because of his cool-headed driver, who sped off with the doors
open and my friend hanging on to the rear seat. And then, one day, I
went to my sister’s house, and found armed guards at the gates. Her
husband, a filmmaker, had also received the dreaded phone call from
Dubai, asking for money and promising retribution.
By now, I had met some of the bhais. Through journalists and
policemen, I had made contact with them and met them in cafes and hotel
rooms and their homes. The bosses of the “companies” (the gangs) were
concerned about PR and therefore easier to meet than their soldiers,
who were always frightened of being ambushed by rival companies or the
police. I listened to them all, and by now I knew that I would write
something about their world, which was not really an “underworld” but
the world that all of us shared. Our lives intersected, and not merely
through violence. I followed the connections, from the bhais to the
policemen and back again, and then followed the gangland links to filmi
parties awash with starlets and producers, and then north to Punjab and
Kashmir and Jammu and points on the border and then east, to the other
side of the country. From the bhais and Sartaj Singh, I was led into
show business, politics, international espionage, and the unnoticed
bravery of common people attempting to live with dignity. I was
prompted more by curiosity than a considered plan: an intelligence
officer in Amritsar gave me a lead I followed to Delhi, and that led
back to Bombay. The novel that grew out of these many meetings moves
through all these landscapes: a police officer falls in love; a young
woman comes to the big city to become a film star; a young girl tries
to understand what has become of her family in the midst of political
chaos and mass murder; a widow battles poverty and the urban pressures
that distort the lives of her young sons; a freshly trained,
inexperienced intelligence officer leads an army patrol into the bleak
iciness of Himalayan peaks; a canny, intelligent woman takes some very
shady money to produce television shows about the sufferings of women;
an idealistic graduate student, hounded by the police and local
politicians, seeks refuge in the ranks of Maoist guerillas; a
right-wing religious leader conducts an enormous yagna or sacrifice for
the citizens of Bombay; a famous, ferocious bhai leads his company to
victory after victory, and discovers the strange emptiness of getting
what he wants.
I was prompted more by curiosity than a considered plan: an intelligence officer in Amritsar gave me a lead I followed to Delhi, and that led back to Bombay.
All these lives, simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, flow around and into each other to make the shape of the novel, which I hope holds what the last words of Love and Longing in Bombay reach for—“only life itself.”
o o o o o
Praise for SACRED GAMES
“SACRED GAMES [is] as hard to put down as it is to pick up.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Monumental…Chandra brilliantly evokes a diverse slice of the
population of Mumbai, a city that comes alive in SACRED GAMES in all
its vibrant chaos.”
— Wall Street Journal
“Page after page it plucks me from the here and now….I really am for
long stretches in some phantasmagoric, confusing, reeking, corrupt,
overheated, overpopulated elsewhere, a Mumbai of the mind, with
characters who surprise me with their look and sound; their twists of
behavior.”
— Sven Birkerts, Boston Sunday Globe
“SACRED GAMES is sweaty, bloody and unapologetically melodramatic. It’s
raucous…It’s comic…In the end, the book is about this city, the dream
factory of India, which remakes everyone and where no one is what he
seems…Chandra gives a startling, blood-pumping fallible humanity to his
characters…Ultimately, we sympathize with them all, hero or villain,
because none of them is innocent.”
— Sandip Roy, San Francisco Chronicle
“Ravishing…An extraordinary work of fiction that will reward you in
full for your investment of time….A chaotic and luminous whole, one
that mirrors Chandra’s capacious view of his homeland.”
— Entertainment Weekly
“Chandra…knows exactly when to break rules and when to follow them…[He]
has a visual way with words that is a tremendous bonus to the reader as
he places us in that overwhelming city…Chandra’s genius is in the way
he trusts his reader.”
— Los Angeles Times
“Chandra’s ambitious, sprawling novel combines the attractions of
19th-century fiction and a modern police procedural…Like Chandra’s
book, Singh’s investigation adds up to much more than appears on the
surface, and we read eagerly to learn what this crime will reveal.”
— People
“A sheer entertainment extravaganza...Expertly paced and
nuanced...SACRED GAMES takes an all-encompassing look at crucial issues
facing modern-day India.”
— Elle
“There is a lot to admire in this novel…Chandra’s writing is energetic and often lovely; the book teems with authentic detail.”
— USA Today
“SACRED GAMES combines the ambition of a 19th-century social novel with
a cops-and-Bhais detective thriller…As sprawling as the heat-drenched
city it richly portrays.”
— New York Times
“Chandra’s stylish, worldly prose attains a Tarantinoesque rapture.”
— The New Yorker
“Bold, fresh and big…SACRED GAMES deserves praise for its ambitions but
also for its terrific achievement…When…you reach the last page…you feel
as though you’ve been expelled from a world that…has come to feel like
a second home.”
— Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
“Chandra pulls strings with a puppeteers mastery,….whetting our
appetites for ever more mayhem...Like Dickens before him, Chandra has
blended a blood-and-thunder page-turner with an exhaustive and
illuminating anatomy of a society…It’s a rare pleasure to be arrested
by this novel’s thunderous momentum, and caught up in its web...Few
readers will be unenthralled.”
— Bruce Allen, Boston Sunday Globe
“[Sacred Games] brings us to India in full force…Impossibly rich.”
— Daily News
“To enter the world of…SACRED GAMES is to be immersed in the crime and corruption of Mumbai…A full-blown literary potboiler.”
— NPR's Morning Edition
“Any book that makes palpable a very foreign city, explores deep moral
questions, and teaches you lots of dirty Hindi is well worth lugging
around. BUY IT.”
— New York magazine
“Chandra’s storytelling powers never flag…Indian fiction in English…has
not often shone its light on the seedier recesses of the country’s
civil life. SACRED GAMES doesn’t so much shine a light as crawl right
in and wallow around in the muck… SACRED GAMES is one of those books
you immerse yourself in, a passport to an alien world, and, like life,
you imagine it could go on forever. It envisions a world-an underworld,
actually-that is complete, persuasive, and startlingly original.”
— Newsday
“Brilliant…compulsively readable...The true protagonist of Vikram
Chandra’s new novel, SACRED GAMES, is the teeming and (sometimes
literally) explosive city of Mumbai…To re-create a city Mr. Chandra has
fashioned a language equal to it, a promiscuous English open to all
comers, as greedy and as vivid as Mumbai itself.”
— New York Sun
“Intoxicating…[SACRED GAMES] is a book that comes loaded with enormous
expectations. I’m happy to report that those expectations are
fulfilled-with gusto…Much more than a simple exercise in crime fiction,
Chandra’s tour de force is ambitious in all its facets. With its
striking prose, ruthless capacity for violence and Gordian composition,
SACRED GAMES offers up a world worthy of the effort required to take it
all in.”
— Rocky Mountain News
“A terrific, brilliant earthmover of a book---CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
crossed with THE GODFATHER with some SOPRANOS-inspired irony thrown
in…If you can lift this tremendous story and take it home and read it,
you’ll probably wonder how you got by so long without it.”
— John Freeman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Well-written entertainment…a plot of Victorian complexity.”
— Atlantic Monthly
“Electrifying…Chandra pulls off some extraordinary writing…He…hands us the keys to the city and reveals its sordid mysteries.”
— The Nation
“A work of masterfully crafted fiction...a gritty and grounded epic
reminiscent of voluminous and character-rich nineteenth century
literature.”
— San Diego Union-Tribune
“Readers who liked the GODFATHER movies will be drawn into SACRED
GAMES, and those who appreciate Dickens will vastly prefer Chandra’s
writing to Mario Puzo’s…Chandra makes an enormous meal of Mumbai…each
ingredient sharp and memorable…SACRED GAMES won’t deliver nirvana, but
submerging in it, like the Ganges itself, can restore your wonder.”
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A story that outweighs the heft of the volume that holds it…This is a
work that can not only suck a reader in, but also turn an outlaw who
should be thoroughly despicable into a heroic figure…A grand story that
is carefully and passionately told…The temptation upon turning the last
page will be to return to the first.”
— Denver Post
“Unfailingly interesting…Superbly realized…The novel bursts with characters…I almost never wanted to put it down.”
— Houston Chronicle
“Chandra…imbues his protagonist with such touching humanity that the
character, warts and all, wins the reader’s empathy…[SACRED GAMES]
nowhere loses narrative tautness…It’s not every day that one reads a
900-page tome this good.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
“A pulsing thriller in which the soul of all Bombay is at stake…The
splendor of Chandra’s prose is quite enough to enrapture a reader for
900 pages…Whatever challenge SACRED GAMES presents to Western readers,
the payoff is grand and satisfying.”
— Seattle Times
“Spiced with flavors of the subcontinent, this epic novel-part crime
thriller, part human drama, part travelogue-is entirely entertaining.”
— Parade
“Exhilaratingly ambitious and entertaining…rollicking and provocative
and frightening and moving…[A] vivid portrait of the clash and jangle
and excitement of modern-day Mumbai…SACRED GAMES is about much more
than its attractively polished surfaces.”
— BookPage
“Monstrously entertaining…A sweeping, sprawling, jaw-dropping gangster
novel featuring the city of Mumbai as its star…Chandra..never lacks for
style-or substance…[This] is the rarest of creations, an irresistible
story that you simply cannot keep out of your head, one that entertains
long after you have stayed up too late reading…It is, more than
anything else, literary magic.”
— Christian Science Monitor
“Readers will…see the India that awakens when the suits and tourists
clear out…The interplay and convergence of the two stories make for an
enthralling experience. Nothing is left untouched-including the
reader.”
— Columbus Dispatch
“Dazzling…a book that sucks you…thoroughly into the world it
creates…Chandra’s sure-handed writing injects the novel with layers of
depth and meaning.”
— Sunday Oregonian
“Lavish, accomplished, and…elegant…[SACRED GAMES] offers Western readers a panoramic view of contemporary India.”
— Tennessean
“Superb…complex, mesmerizing…It’s hard to do justice to the richness
and vitality of this story---it’s a full-immersion experience, as if
Dickens had written THE GODFATHER and placed it in India…I’ve rarely
read a book with such a rich depth of characters.”
— Grand Rapids Press
“A remarkable blend of literary novel and potboiler.”
— San Antonio Express-News
“A rich and utterly convincing world…SACRED GAMES…evokes its own kind
of wonder as it builds to a vision of life in the teeming city…Chandra
is a writer who doesn’t cut corners…[He] keeps the engine of suspense
and intrigue running throughout...a monumental portrait of interwoven
lives that lingers with a reader long after the case is closed.”
— Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“Riveting...Chandra has created a compulsively involving literary
thriller...A splendidly big, finely made book destined to dazzle a big
audience.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“Masterfully crafted fiction…Gritty and grounded epic, reminiscent of
voluminous and character-rich nineteenth century serial literature…The
resonance and elegance and, at times, economy of his writing…put across
the full vulnerability and humanity of his characters, and the
challenges of life.”
— Blogcritics.org Books
“Vivid…Chandra has taken a simple story about a police investigation of
a murder suicide and turned it into a swirling ride into the underbelly
of Bombay…The vibrancy of Indian culture and the heroism of everyday
life comes through in Chandra’s vivid characters.”
— Dylan Foley, Newhouse News Service
“Most of the nation’s critics have been beside themselves over this
ambitious novel, and with good reasons…This is no simple
Holmes-Moriarty adventure or merely an entertaining read. It woks on
numerous levels, the most vibrant of which paints a realistic landscape
of India and the intrinsic machinery that allows it to move forward.”
— Sacramento Bee
“Unstinting in its ambition and flourishing in its characters…[An]
intriguing act of literary decolonization…Sacred Games is cinematic in
scope. Chandra has found a vehicle particularly suited to the New
India-to its passions and poverty, its outsize dreams and
insecurities.”
— Newsweek (International Edition)
