![]() ![]() Central to Kapoor’s success is her agile style. Kapoor situates her story in the broiling nexus of India’s economic and political development. Good as she is at ripping up the pages with acts of violence, she’s even more sly about pulling us into these characters’ lives. It’s a complicated but never confusing structure that unravels some mysteries while spinning new ones. Kapoor moves back and forth through time and up and down the social ladder. This is a rare case of a book bounding as high as its hype. Finally free from the book’s grip, now all I want to do is get others hooked. Swinging from the hovels to the palaces of contemporary India, this hypnotic story poses a horrible dilemma: For days, I was torn between gorging on Age of Vice or rationing out the chapters to make them last. The most dazzling explosions to herald 2023 come from Deepti Kapoor’s novel Age of Vice. Rave The Washington Post Forget the fireworks in New York, London and Dubai. Indeed, there’s as much implicit wisdom in these pages about how to live as how to write. As the novel progresses, the act of recording and shaping family tales becomes central to the plot. Ryan captures the despair that sometimes opens up under a young person with no more warning or explanation than a sinkhole. These stories could get precious if Ryan weren’t so attentive to the strains of violence and heartache running under the surface of the village. Everything here feels utterly surprising and yet entirely inevitable. ![]() We encounter Saoirse’s life in finely cut anecdotes polished in the tumbler of her little home. ![]() That constraint makes heavy demands on the narrative, but the effect for readers is a series of emerald moments. The entire novel is presented as a series of two-page chapters - each about 500 words long. The paradoxical smallness of this place is aptly reflected in the form Ryan uses for The Queen of Dirt Island. Ryan.finds everything he needs to traverse the universe of the human heart. ![]()
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