The Age of Shiva
Author(s): Manil Suri
It is India, 1955: as the scars of Partition are just beginning to heal, in Ramjas College, Delhi, seventeen-year-old Meera is enraptured. In a spotlight, a handsome young man, Dev, is singing a song that is redolent with a longing, a hunger, that is thrillingly new to her. Beside her sits her older sister Roopa: the favourite, the beauty, her fairness tonight enhanced by clusters of gold at her ears, and a glossy streak of forbidden lipstick. Later, jilted by Roopa, it is to Meera that Dev turns for comfort. Though their hasty marriage enrages her father, who has always been ambitious for his daughters, Meera takes on her new role without a murmur, suppressing her bitter regret, obedient to her new in-laws, fasting according to Hindu ritual and tolerating Dev's drunken night-time fumblings. A move to Bombay, so Dev can chase his dream of success as a Bollywood singer, seems at first like a fresh new start, but as that dream - and their marriage - turns to ashes, he is more often to be found gazing into the bottom of a glass at Auntie's Place than in a recording studio. But when their son Ashvin is born, everything changes. First published 2008.
Product Information
A huge Indian novel in the tradition of A Fine Balance, The Glass Palace and A Suitable Boy The Death of Vishnu sold almost 100,000 copies in the UK alone The Death of Vishnu was also an international bestseller and was translated into 22 languages
'Quite wonderful ... arch, funny and criminally well written.' The Times 'Manil Suri's THE DEATH OF VISHNU finds the universe in a block of Bombay flats; it is tender, caustic, witty and inspired.' Jim Crace 'Manil Suri has been likened to Narayan, Coetzee, Naipaul, Chekhov and Flaubert. But Suri has developed a voice all his own ... his eye for a story, his wit and astute observations of human folly, indicate that, one day, he may himself be someone to be compared to.' Independent 'A wonder of a book ... an astonishing debut.' Amy Tan
Manil Suri was born in Bombay in 1959 and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland. His first novel, The Death of Vishnu, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, nominated for the PEN Faulkner Award, the LA Times Book Award and the WH Smith Book Award. It won the Barnes & Noble 2001 Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction. Manil Suri was an inaugural winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers.
General Fields
- :
- : Bloomsbury
- : bloomsbury
- : 01 January 1900
- : 234mm X 153mm
- : United Kingdom
- : books
Special Fields
- : Manil Suri
- : Paperback
- : Export ed
- : 813.6
- : 464
