Book review
In Vikram Chandra 's astonishing first novel, the gods Hanuman, Ganesha and Yama descend on a house in an Indian city to vie for the soul of a wounded monkey. A bargain is struck: the monkey must tell a story, and if he can keep his audience entertained, he shall live. The result is Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a tale of nineteenth century India: of Sanjay, a poet, and Sikander, a warrior; of hoofbeats thundering through the streets of Calcutta and the birth of a luminous child; of great wars and love affairs and a city gone 'mad with poetry'. And woven into this tapestry of stories is a second, totally modern narrative, the adventures of a young Indian criss-crossing America in a car with his friends and his eventual return to his homeland.

'Chandra's writing—tender, funny, incandescent—so animates his subjects that it becomes possible to see through other eyes, to sense another culture…’
—Elizabeth Young in the Guardian

'Vikram Chandra's first novel makes its British counterparts look like apologetic throat-clearings. Verbally lithe, astute, marvellously vivid, it brings the Indian gods into compelling play with our solid strivings, where telling a story—hundreds of them—becomes its own life-preserving act.'
—Adam Thorpe

'Vikram Chandra is beginning his writing life already a master.'
—John Hawkes


About the author Vikram Chandra was born in 1961. He is the author of Love and Longing in Bombay, which was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book (Eurasia Region), and also the Paris Review Discovery Prize for the story Dharma. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker and Paris Review. He divides his time between Mumbai and Washington DC, where he teaches at George Washington University.