Bombay Tiger

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Kamala Markandaya, author of the classic Nectar in a Sieve, published ten novels in all, the last of which appeared in 1982. For the next two decades, till her death in 2004, she lived a life of near anonymity in the outskirts of London. But she hadn’t stopped writing; shortly after her death, her daughter discovered the finished typescript of a new, unpublished novel: The Catalyst: Alias, Bombay Tiger.

Set in the 1980s, Bombay Tiger tells the story of Ganguli—mercurial and larger-than-life—who arrives in Bombay with little more than ruthless ambition, and becomes the city’s biggest industrialist. A Citizen Kane-like figure—destined to become one of the most memorable protagonists in Indian fiction—Ganguli is emblematic of a changing India, post the era of high socialism, beginning to be transformed by private enterprise. This sweeping novel, poignant and comic by turns, traces his dramatic rise and fall, his loves and losses, and his eventual redemption.

Gloriously rich in incident and character and marked by Markandaya’s deep humanity, Bombay Tiger is the work of a major writer at the height of her powers.