Quarterlife - Devika Rege

One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2024

'A fearless achievement' The New Yorker

'Blazingly original . . . Fiercely intelligent . . . Rege is at the forefront of a new generation of authors' Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao

The Bharat Party has come to power after an intensely divisive election. Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured home to Mumbai by their promise of ' better days '. With him is Amanda, eager to escape her New England town by volunteering in a Muslim-majority slum. Inspired by them, Naren's charismatic brother Rohit sets out to explore his ancestral heritage in the countryside, where he falls in with the ery young men who drive the Hindu nationalist machine.

As they each come to grips with the new India, their journeys coalesce into a riveting milieu characterized by brutal debates and desires as fraught as they are compulsive. The result is an ever-widening chorus that feeds into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets - and the simmering unrest erupts.

Quarterlife is as sweeping as it is intimate. With profound empathy and insight, Devika Rege lays bare the roots of political belief in a time of reckoning for democracies worldwide - this is a brilliantly innovative work that tests the limits of what the novel can achieve.