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As Mumbai empties under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation, Sarita, a thirty-three-year-old statistician, can only think of one thing: being reunited with Karun, her physicist husband. Why has he vanished? Who is he running from? How will they form the family of three he's always wanted? To find him, Sarita must journey across the surreal landscape of a near-abandoned city, braving gangs of competing Hindu and Muslim hoodlums. Joining her is Jaz—nominally a Muslim, but whose true religion has always been sex with other men. Danger lurks around every corner, but so does the incongruous and the absurd: the patron goddess Devi ma has even materialized on a beach to save her city from harm. Sarita's search leads her to this beach, thrusting her into a trinity so mercurial, so consuming, that it will alter her life more fundamentally than any apocalypse to come.
Fearlessly provocative, wickedly comedic, and propelled with rocket-fuel energy, The City of Devi exuberantly upends assumptions of politics, religion, sex, and India's global emergence.
"Suri's dynamic, unabashed voice leaves one for the most part happily, perpetually off-balance and, though the tone is too unbound at times—especially toward the rather crazed ending—the vibrancy and compelling plot carry through the occasional sag or inconsistency." - Publishers Weekly
"The melodrama of romantic intrigue is this novel's driving force." - Kirkus Reviews
"The City of Devi combines, in a magician's feat, the thrill of Bollywood with the pull of a thriller. Set in a city at the brink of the end, this is a fiercely imagined story of three souls haunted by a love that will change their most elemental ideas of identity. Manil Suri's bravest and most passionate book." - Kiran Desai
This information about The City of Devi 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.
Manil Suri is the internationally acclaimed author of The Death of Vishnu and other books. His work has been translated into twenty-seven languages and received several honors, including winning the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and being longlisted for the Booker Prize. He is a distinguished professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and lives with his husband in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Author Interview
Link to Manil Suri's Website
Name Pronunciation
Manil Suri: Ma-neel Soo-ree
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