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.
Shortlisted for Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2012 and Man Asian Prize 2012.
Title: Narcopolis
Subtitle:
Contributors:
By (author)
Jeet Thayil
ISBN 13: 9780571275762
ISBN 10: 0571275761
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Imprint: Faber and Faber
Publication Date: 1/02/2012
Place of Publication:
London,
United Kingdom
Edition:
BIC Subjects:
Modern fiction
NBS Classification: General & Literary Fiction
Dewey Classification:
823.92
(DC23)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Height: 234mm
Width: 153mm
Thickness: 22mm
Weight: 406g