Vikram Chandra is a master of the close-up – zooming to capture every nuance and detail of his characters lives – but the novel is anything but small screen. It is as pacy as a potboiler, as grand and as ambitious as an epic. The story of Inspector Sartaj Singh’s pursuit of the gangland don, Ganesh Gaitonde is one of the great detective thrillers of our time. In its nearly thousand pages, Vikram Chandra manages to interweave multiple genres, each as compelling as the other, each intertwined storyline finding its own moving, violent, spectacular resolution. Like the city it’s set in, Sacred Games is teeming with stories – love stories, crimes, stories of displacement, of ambition, of moral conundrums, of life – lives – and death. Citation by the judges for the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction, 2006: Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games wins the Hutch Crossword prize for English Fiction because in a crowded field filled with really first rate writing, the jury unanimously felt it was the outstanding novel of this year.
All these lives, simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, flow around and into each other to make the shape of the novel, which holds what the last words of Love and Longing in Bombay reach for - "only life itself." Sacred Games moves through many 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. Around this story, Vikram Chandra has constructed an opulent, exhilarating narrative, one that bridges the serious and the popular, recalling the great and capacious novels of the 19th century. As the stakes mount and Sartaj seeks knowledge of his prey, it becomes clear that the game the two players thought they were engaged in is in fact part of a much larger scenario, one that expands beyond their city and implicates the planet. The confrontation between Sartaj and Ganesh lies at the heart of this epic novel. Sartaj Singh, a seasoned and cynical Bombay police officer, is summoned by an anonymous tip one morning, by a voice which promises him an opportunity to capture the powerful Ganesh Gaitonde, criminal overlord of the G-Company. "Notable Books," San Francisco Chronicle (USA) Winner of the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction for 2006įinalist, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction Sacred Games is a literary novel that is also a crime novel, a detective story, and a thriller. “Roll of Honour,” The Financial Express (India) “Fiction of the Year,” Business Standard (India) "10 Best Asian Books of 2006," Time (Asia Edition) "Pick of the Month," January 2007, Booksense (USA) "Books of the Year," Financial Times (UK) "Twenty Best Books of the Year," Le Point (France)
"Books of the Year," The Independent (UK)
SACRED GAMES BOOK SERIES
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