Red Earth and Pouring Rain - Tapa blanda

An epic tale of nineteenth-century India - of Sanjay, a poet, and Sikander, a warrior; of hoofbeats thundering through the streets of Calcutta; of great wars and love affairs and a city gone mad with poetry. Woven into it are the adventures of a young Indian criss-crossing America in a car with his friends. 'A dazzling first novel . . . Not merely drawing on myth but making it.' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times 'Marvellous and compelling.' Charles Palliser 'A brilliant novel of wondrous conjuring and stunning import.' John Hawkes 'One of the finest Indian novels of the decade.' Shashi Tharoor

Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize. Love and Longing in Bombay was first published in 1997 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region) and was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize. He has also co-written Mission Kashmir, an Indian feature film. His new novel, Sacred Games, was published by Faber and Faber in September 2006. Vikram Chandra currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, where he lives with his wife Melanie and teaches at the University of California. His work has been translated into eleven languages.