Love and Longing in Bombay

Vikram Chandra has effected a number of miracles in his new book, a collection of interrelated short stories, which I believe stands up as a really fine novel… it is simply at ease, in a fashion rare in the contemporary novel, rarer yet when that novel addresses India, which seems to whisk many of those who try to approach it in prose into a frenzy. Love and Longing in Bombay is a book that seeps and chatters in the mind of the reader whenever it is set aside. When you finish it, you miss it, as you miss a city, as Bombayites must miss their city even while living in it, on account of its unchanging traditions and daily frantic adaptations to the demands of the population, the industry, the west and the century… How rare and calm a talent… Chandra has decided to distil. The effect is dazzling… . To write with such a swing and ease about so great an area of contested preoccupation is to prove that one is born to it. — Candia McWilliam, The Independent on Sunday (UK).