Reviews of Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

Media Reviews

Elle magazine - Jenny Feldman ...thanks to its muscular prose and Chandra's obvious fondness for even his most deeply flawed characters, the book also succeeds as an entertainment extravaganza: a detective novel in full, and then a good deal more.

Entertainment Weekly - Jennifer Reese There's a superabundance of tumultuous narrative, acres of magnificent prose, and maybe a dozen too many characters. Yet these unruly parts ultimately fit together into a chaotic and luminous whole, one that mirrors Chandra's capacious vision of his homeland.

Rocky Mountain News - Clayton Moore With its striking prose, ruthless capacity for violence and Gordian composition, Sacred Games offers up a world worthy of the effort required to take it all in.

The Plain Dealer - Karen Long The novel oscillates splendidly between its two central characters... Chandra makes an enormous meal of Mumbai, the metropolis once called Bombay, each ingredient sharp and memorable... The imagery can be stunning... submerging in [Sacred Games] like the Ganges itself, can restore your wonder.

The San Francisco Chronicle - Sandip Roy Make no mistake, "Sacred Games" is a thriller. It has shootouts, sexy sirens, cops and robbers, double-crossers and hardboiled gutter-pungent lingo. It's not for the squeamis ....[but it] is also a cocky experiment with the conventions of a thriller, breaking every rule a film director tells Gaitonde is needed for a successful formula film. Chandra adds long insets that break up the narrative to go into the back stories of peripheral characters .... Unlike a whodunit, Chandra's plot is hydra-headed ....

The Washington Post The enthusiasm with which the venerable firm of HarperCollins is promoting this massive deadweight of a novel, and the money that it's putting where its mouth is, leaves one to ponder once again the eternally mysterious ways of the book-publishing industry ...... Et cetera, et cetera. It may sound exciting and engaging, but it isn't, and when the novel's climax finally occurs, it's the most anticlimactic climax I can recall. But it is, perhaps, a fitting climax to a book that, for all its ambition and intelligence, ends up going nowhere at all.

The Observer (UK) - Adams Mars-Jones [Will] Chandra be able to etch into this second-hand template all the magical dirty details of the city? As the book goes on, the answer more and more seems to be 'yes', but Chandra could have made it easier on himself, not to mention the reader.

The Guardian - Kevin Rushby Chandra works hard to keep the reader on board: after all, this is a mixed-up, muddled-up India where illiterate farmers chat on mobile phones and respectable people kill their daughters for marrying out of caste. It didn't, however, quite carry me all the way. Real-life Indian gangsters may have gone global, but somehow the world we enter later in the story - of high finance, hitmen and luxury yachts - seems best left to James Bond. Nevertheless, there is much to admire.

The Scotsman - Stephen Thompson All in all, this is a very patchy read. At the heart of the book is a very clever detective yarn which any crime writer would be proud of, but Chandra surrounds it with so much verbiage you could scream. Oh for a bit of judicious editing. At 900 pages, the book is too long. Chandra may have departed from the typical Indian novel in terms of subject matter, but when it comes to length, he reveals himself to be every bit the traditionalist. Sacred Games, alas, is the poorer because of this.

Booklist - Donna Seaman Starred Review. A splendidly big, finely made book destined to dazzle a big audience.

Kirkus Reviews [Sacred Games] is Vikram Chandra's... stunning new novel... Chandra's writing is so elegant and so irresistible, it elevates the classic cops-and-robbers story to new heights.

Library Journal Chandra also imbues his characters with humanity and color, even if his plot and writing style could do with tighter editing. Recommended.

Publishers Weekly The novel eventually becomes a world, and the reader becomes a resident rather than a visitor, but living there could begin to feel excessive.

Reader Reviews

Judy Krueger
A Bollywood Thriller
Yes, this book is long. Yes, it is wordy and heavy to hold while reading. He uses many Indian words and though there is a glossary, it doesn't contain all the words he uses. But I liked it anyway. The story has two main characters. Inspector ...   Read More

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