The Last Song of Dusk - Tapa blanda

Surrealism and magic are mixed with the more everyday traumas of life and love. This is a larger than life story with a definite Bollywood feel to it...The main characters are well drawn, in all their exuberant eccentricity, and their merciless story makes for an adventurous read. (WATERSTONES BOOKS QUARTERLY)

The recent spate of magic-realism novels by writers with one foot in the Raj has been an engaging cultural seam...Shanghvi offers a little something extra... Like Kunzru, Shanghvi places his characters in historically auspicious circumstances, as if the voice of modernity has entered a time machine. (i-D magazine (March 2004))

this is a modern fairy tale about love and kismet that touches all the senses. (COMPANY (April 2004))

[a] colourful first novel...what begins as an erotic fairy tale grows into an exploration of love and loss, sexuality and innocence, friendship and solitude...Shanghvi's loose, poetic style, [is] cut with a dash of magical realism...Shanghvi's story has eloquent insights into the nature of love. (Su Lin Lewis TLS (5.3.04))

[a] magical debut..Madcap characters shimmy across the pages, throwing out slangy witticisms with insouciant charm, but underneath the glitz the mood is mythically melancholy. Delicious. (Eithne Farry ELLE (April '04))

A gently magical taste of India. (MIRROR (12.3.04))

'the novel is beautifully paced, exploring huge themes - fate, death, lasting love, vengeance, ambition, acceptance and - via tiny moments - the trickiness of life. The author twists words mercilessly, his choice of language veering between delicate beauty and raucous irreverence. And there's some extraordinarily fantastic, surprising writing about sexual organs: read it and weep.' **** (Angela Jackson INK)

'The magical tale of an Indian family dealing with love, loss and long forgotten secrets.' *** (HEAT (27 March - 2 April))

[an] exuberhant performance, part of the post-magical realist trend in Indo-English fiction - with its fantasy, pastiche and satire, and tendency to turn every seed of imagintion into a towering tree...Shanghvi's extravagant prose teems with adjectives, adverbs [and] personifications. (Aamer Hussein INDEPENDENT (9.4.04))

A mixture of magical realism, tragi-comedy, and prose poetry, his debut novel sweeps readers into a tale as old as time, populated by eccentrically beautiful characters...A sure shot on the best-seller list. (GOOD BOOK GUIDE (1/4/04))