• Free Library of Philadelphia, USA
  
  
  

In the tradition of Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, a brilliant new voice tells an exuberant and tender story of love and loss, sex, karma, and colonialism set in 1920s India.

Anuradha Patwardhan is a young woman of such legendary beauty the peacocks line up to bid her farewell when she leaves her family home. She is endowed with a gift for singing magical songs, and she is off to Bombay to marry Vardhmaan, a well-to-do doctor so handsome, serious, and dashing, that women feign illness to see him. They are such a charmed couple, only a fairytale marriage can be their due. But The Last Song of Dusk tells the far darker and deeper story of love freighted with envy, passion, and loss.

When their first child dies in a horrible accident, their fates begin to unravel in a heartbroken old villa that seems to have designs on their second child, the unnaturally silent Shloka. Into their lives comes an alluring girl with a trace of leopard blood in her veins. With her in their midst and shaking up Bombay's status quo, they navigate the ever-changing landscape of love.

Written with an exhilarating verve for language that conveys the intensity, colour, and pungency of India, and with appearances by Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, and the father of Bollywood movies, The Last Song of Dusk is an outrageously original first novel by a writer of enormous talent.

A born and bred Bombaywallah, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi was educated in India, England, and America. A past contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and Elle, he divides his time between the San Francisco Bay area and Bombay. He is at work on a second novel.