Description

‘Truly infectious’ Guardian

‘A sparkling debut, full of tenderness and mischief. It’s as if Roth and Narayan had a baby’ Aatish Taseer

It is a day of triumph for Appa and Amma, who have driven home a shiny new Honda Civic to show off to their neighbours in Blue Hills housing colony. But their eldest son Sreenath is behaving strangely, and it soon becomes clear why: a secretly filmed video of Sreenath and his girlfriend Anita has been posted to a porn site, and nearly everyone they know has seen it.

The ensuing war – with Sreenath and Anita on one side and their families on the other – becomes a news sensation, emblematic of a wider generational struggle. The novel is narrated by Sreenath’s younger brother, who is twenty years old and eager to escape his hometown and embrace his brother’s rebellious spirit. But to keep his family together he will have to compromise his integrity and, in doing so, bring buried tensions between him and his brother to the surface.

Full of dark comedy and insight about Indian society, shame and the online generation, this is a poignant story about now told by a narrator who will beguile and surprise you.

Publisher Review

A sparkling debut, full of tenderness and mischief. It's as if Roth and Narayan had a baby * Aatish Taseer, author of The Way Things Were * Humorous, insightful and enormously touching . . . an exquisite debut * Clare Allan, author of Poppy Shakespeare * One of the wittiest, cleverest, most perceptive books I've read about India in years. An acidic comedy of manners, an anarchic demolition of modern Indian mores, as well as a melancholic, sweet-sour love story about the impossibility of being young. -- Rahul Raina, author of How to Kidnap the Rich So here it is, at last: an insider view of the clash between generations seen from the perspective of the online Indian Gen Z. Written with wryness, compassion, intelligence, crystal clarity and a dry sense of humour, Aravind Jayan's unputdownable debut features on of the most engaging and Nabokovianly complicated narrators I've encountered in the last God knows how many years. It's impossible not to love this book. You'll laugh and laugh until you find yourself devastated by the last thirty or so pages, and you'll still be laughing. -- Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others Utterly original and beautifully rendered. In the age of the internet, still stories of family remain ageless. Jayan sets us in a moment when the past and present are in precarious balance and leaves us to settle for ourselves what has been broken and what will never be. Loved it. -- Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Laugh-out-loud funny - a beguiling debut by a writer of great charm. -- Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies