Quarterlife – Devika Rege

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WINNER OF THE MATHRUBHUMI BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 & RAMNATH GOENKA SAHITYA SAMMAN 2023

The Bharat Party has come to power in India after an intensely divisive election. Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured by its economic mandate to return to Mumbai. With him is Amanda, eager to escape her New England town through a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-majority slum. Meanwhile, Naren’s younger brother, Rohit, sets out to explore his cultural roots in the country’s heartland, where he ends up befriending the fiery young men who drive the Hindu nationalist machine. Each of these journeys opens up an astonishing milieu, its debates and desires as fraught as they are compulsive. The result is an ever-widening chorus that feeds into a festive night when the simmering unrest erupts.

A brilliantly innovative and ambitious work, Quarterlife lays bare the forces that shape a society’s political beliefs even as it tests the limits of the novel as a form.