Vikram Chandra’s first novel is a big, structurally restless book that moves between nineteenth-century history, family legend, gossip, crime, colonial residue, and modern India without ever feeling like it’s just showing off.

The plot turns around Sanjay, laid up after an accident and being told stories by those around him, while the novel keeps breaking outward into earlier lives, invented pasts, and half-mythic versions of the world that produced him.

Soldiers, judges, mothers, hustlers, lovers, local legends, and imperial leftovers all press into the same narrative field, so the novel becomes a book about inheritance in the messiest sense: blood, nation, violence, language, masculinity, memory. It has some of the sprawl of Rushdie-era Indian fiction, but it’s more sensual and more interested in how stories deform the people who have to live inside them.

Faber & Faber paperback, 1996. First Faber paperback edition, first printing. Good condition overall. Light shelf wear and rubbing to wraps, with minor edge wear and a little knocking at corners/spine ends. Binding sound; interior clean.