by Akhil Sharma
First published 2001
Ram Karan takes his cut from the Delhi school system's daily corruption, living in a slum with his widowed daughter and eight-year-old granddaughter. He bumbles through his days as the department's designated bribe collector, carrying guilt over something he desperately wants to forget. When assassins kill Rajiv Gandhi, political chaos engulfs India. Ram finds himself caught in a web of betrayals that could destroy him and his family. As he scrambles to survive the shifting loyalties around him, his daughter reveals the very crime he thought he had buried forever. Ram must navigate both the external danger of political upheaval and the internal reckoning with his past. Sharma creates a morally complex protagonist who elicits both sympathy and revulsion, a man whose small corruptions mirror the larger failures of his society.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, crime, contemporary, political-thriller, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: morally-complex-protagonist, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Delhi, India
Period: 20th-century
282 pages · Paperback · Faber & Faber
Content warnings: violence