Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2015
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A highly charged debut novel about a young woman in India, and the love that both shatters and transforms her.
She is twenty and restless in New Delhi. Her mother has died; her father has left for Singapore. He is a few years older, just back to India from New York. When they meet in a café one afternoon, she--lonely, hungry for experience, yearning to break free of tradition--casts aside her fears and throws herself headlong into a love affair, one that takes her where she has never been before.
Told in a voice at once gritty and lyrical, mournful and frank, A Bad Character is an unforgettable hymn to an exhilarating, dangerous city, and a portrait of desire and its consequences as timeless as it is universal.
"Overfreighted with the angst of youth, this novel is at its most impressive in its impressionistic evocation of a dazzling, dangerous cityscape." - Kirkus
"The story and the style are reminiscent of Marguerite Duras's The Lover, but when fused with the vivid Delhi scenes, Kapoor's novel ventures into exciting and original territory." - Publishers Weekly
"As the narrative skips through time, there emerges a poignant and impressionistic portrait of the end of adolescence and a changing world...A promising first novel." - The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"The characters are interesting and the story grips, but the heart of this book is Delhi: filthy, challenging, destructive and thrillingly alive." - The Daily Mail (UK)
"Slender, mysterious...This novel offers vivid insights into what it means to be a woman in 21st-century Delhi." - The Observer (UK)
"Sinewy in its prose and fierce in its sentiment, A Bad Character will invite scrutiny for its raw sex and even rawer emotions...This is a book to be read in one go. It is liberating, especially for any young woman who wants to live life looking her demons in the eye." - India Today (India)
"With remarkable candor, she crafts sentences that stand out for their elegance and brevity; they linger in your memory long after the last page has been turned." - The Indian Express (India)
"An impressive debut...fast-paced, compelling...In its dark tone and impressionistic style, A Bad Character is reminiscent of the European literature and cinema of the 1950s and '60s...Intense." - DNA Mumbai (India)
"This stunning novel about female desire is the literary fiction debut of the year. Kapoor is a compelling new voice. With its sense of urgency and stripped-down sentences, there is a Kerouac-like quality to her prose. A fan of Marguerite Duras's The Lover? Get this book." - Vogue India (India)
This information about A Bad Character was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Mathew Parker
Deepti Kapoor was born in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, and grew up in Bombay, Bahrain and Dehradun. In 1997 she went to the University of Delhi to study journalism and later completed an MA in Social Psychology. She spent the next decade as a journalist in Delhi, driving around the city, finding stories, and learning its streets. The author of the novel Bad Character, she now lives in Portugal with her husband.
Name Pronunciation
Deepti Kapoor: DEEP-tee kuh-POOR
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