Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

The New York Times Book Review described it as “huge, magical, cinematic,” and critics around the world proclaimed it the year’s most astonishing debut. Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain is an unforgettable reading experience, a contemporary Thousand and One Nights — with an eighteenth-century warrior-poet (now reincarnated as a typewriting monkey) and an Indian student home from college in America switching off as our Scheherazades: Ranging from bloody battles in colonial India to college anomie in California, from Hindu gods to MTV, Chandra’s novel is engrossing, enthralling, impossible to put down — a remarkable meditation on quests and homecomings, good and evil, storytelling and redemption.

“A dazzling feat of imagination, technique, and wordplay.” — Entertainment Weekly

WINNER OF THE DAVID HIGHAM PRIZE FOR FICTION AND THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK

Vikram Chandra is also the author of Love and Longing in Bombay . He lives in Washington, D.C., where he is a visiting professor of English at George Washington University. He can be reached by E-mail at vchandra@mindspring.com.