No God in Sight

A daring novel about present-day Bombayand the individual lives that spark the city's consciousness. Fast-paced and innovative, "No God in Sight" captures the seething multiplicity of Bombay through first-person accounts of an abortionist, a convert, a pregnant refugee, a gangster in hiding, a butcher, and an apathetic CEO, among others. As the reader is hurled from monologue to short story to anecdote, disparate lives collide in tantalising ways. A family flees religious persecution in their village to take refuge in an urban slum; women walk the tightrope of free will and dormant violence; a father and son grant each other the relief of estrangement; and young men and women struggle to comprehend the consequences of sexual attraction. At the heart of the action is the city itself: a teeming, breathing, suffering Bombay that demands subservience and total surrender before it will sanction survival. Insightful, ironic, and scathingly honest, "No God in Sight" is a brilliant début by a young writer.