Siddhartha Deb

Light at the End of the World

A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb's experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to undertake this book and travel throughout the subcontinent. The Beautiful and the Damned examines India's many contradictions through various individual and extraordinary perspectives. With lyrical and commanding prose, Deb introduces the reader to an unforgettable group of Indians, including a Gatsby-like mogul in Delhi whose hobby is producing big-budget gangster films that no one sees; a wiry, dusty farmer named Gopeti whose village is plagued by suicides and was the epicenter of a riot; and a sad-eyed waitress named Esther who has set aside her dual degrees in biochemistry and botany to serve Coca-Cola to arms dealers at an upscale hotel called Shangri La. Like no other writer, Deb humanizes the post-globalization experience—its advantages, failures, and absurdities. India is a country where you take a nap and someone has stolen your job, where you buy a BMW but still have to idle for cows crossing your path. A personal, narrative work of journalism and cultural analysis in the same vein as Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and V. S. Naipaul's India series, The Beautiful and the Damned is an important and incisive new work. The Beautiful and the Damned is a Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction title for 2011.

A Portrait of the New India

The Beautiful and the Damned

a novel

The Point of Return

Connecting India’s tumultuous 19th and 20th centuries to its potentially apocalyptic future, this sweeping tale of rebellion, courage, and brutality reinvents historical fiction for our time: a magisterial work of shifting forms reminiscent of Cloud Atlas and Underworld. Delhi, the near future: a former journalist goes in search of answers after she finds herself stripped of identity and citizenship and thrust into a vast conspiracy involving secret detention centers, government sanctioned murders, online rage, nationalist violence, and a figure of shifting identifies known as the “New Delhi Monkey Man.” Bhopal, 1984: an assassin hunts a whistleblower through a central Indian city that will shortly be the site of the worst industrial disaster in history. Calcutta, 1947: a veterinary student’s life and work connect him to an ancient Vedic aircraft. And in 1859, a detachment of British soldiers ride towards the Himalayas in search of the last surviving leader of an anti-colonial rebellion. These timelines interweave to form a kaleidoscopic, epic novel in which each section is a pursuit, centered around a character who must find or recover crucial but hidden truths in their respective time. Mirroring the future and the past, these narratives uncover the core of the Indian identity. The Light at the End of the World, Siddhartha Deb’s first novel in a decade and a half, is an astonishing work that brilliantly reimagines the structure of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

The Light at the End of the World

A compelling, chilling novel where characters fade in and out, paths lead nowhere, and nothing is quite what it seems Amrit is a reporter for the Sentinel, dispatched to 'the region' on the vaguest of assignments. Despite his initial reluctance, Amrit has known for a while that his career is going nowhere, and is hopeful he may uncover enough of interest and intrigue to secure him a job with a foreign magazine where he has a vague contact. He has the perfect place to start: a photograph he's uncovered of a young woman, ostensibly involved in pornography, taken captive by a shadowy insurgent group and paraded before the press as a lesson to others like her. Yet, following her trail through dead ends and paths that peter out, Amrit soon learns that in the region, nothing is quite what it seems. Finally, with his goal in sight, Amrit is forced to rethink his quest and, indeed, where his journey will take him next.

Surface

"A personal, narrative work of journalism and cultural analysis, The beautiful and the damned examines India's many contradictions through five individual perspectives."--Publisher's description.

The Beautiful & the Damned

When he returned to India in 2004 after six years in New York, Siddhartha Deb discovered that a sweeping change had overtaken the country. Deb undertook an exploration of this vast, complex and bewildering nation, trying to make sense of what was underway. The Beautiful and the Damned is the triumphant outcome. From the worker at the call centre remaking herself from her provincial moorings to the migrant sweatshop worker trying to make his way in the city, Deb tells the story of India through its people: aspiring and deluded, desperate and hopeful, beautiful and damned.

Siddhartha Deb

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