The Bharat Party has come to power in India after an intensely divisive election. Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured by its economic mandate to return to Mumbai. With him is Amanda, eager to escape her New England town through a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-majority slum. Meanwhile, Naren’s younger brother Rohit sets out to explore his cultural roots in the country’s heartland, where he ends up befriending the fiery young men who feed off the Hindu nationalist machine.
From identity politics to corporate avarice to the limits of idealism, each of these characters embodies a hypothesis. As they come to grips with the new India, they also become aware of a deeply fraught and complex milieu. The result is an ever-widening story that builds up to a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets, and the simmering unrest erupts.
Devika Rege’s Quarterlife is as much a social and philosophical inquiry as a political bildungsroman. It is also a brilliantly innovative and ambitious work that tests the limits of what the novel can achieve.
From identity politics to corporate avarice to the limits of idealism, each of these characters embodies a hypothesis. As they come to grips with the new India, they also become aware of a deeply fraught and complex milieu. The result is an ever-widening story that builds up to a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets, and the simmering unrest erupts.
Devika Rege’s Quarterlife is as much a social and philosophical inquiry as a political bildungsroman. It is also a brilliantly innovative and ambitious work that tests the limits of what the novel can achieve.
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Reviews
What a blazingly original voice, what a fiercely intelligent engagement with contemporary world politics and culture. Devika Rege is at the forefront of a new generation of authors.
What begins as a novel of ideas becomes the secret history of a nation. A superb read ... both moving and inspiring.
Dazzling, sophisticated, and wholly achieved in its ambition, Quarterlife emerges out of the tradition of the philosophical novel. Devika Rege is a transformative novelist.
Finally, a novel about our roiling times by a writer of clear-eyed empathy, the ability to listen closely and to step out of cosmopolitan cocoons. Utterly masterful and moving.
In the fashion of the big novels by Salman Rushdie or Amitav Gosh
A landmark novel . . . Rege has a vast descriptive repertoire, is willing to take astonishing risks with structure, and is immaculate in her numerous interiority dives. Her hand is so sure, it's often impossible to believe that Quarterlife is a debut.
What's especially exciting is the freshness in Rege's turn of phrase - the rhythm in her sentences feels new, and marks the arrival of a voice we have not heard before in Indian literature in English.
Bears witness to an extraordinary moment in history and does not let you look away either. An elegant, ambitious debut . . . a testament to the clarity truth can gain from craft.
One of the best character-driven novels out in India this year: this is wholly about how people think, how their perceptions shape their behaviour, and how those perceptions may change.
A contemporary novel that cohesively sketches the expanse of India's social and political landscape with acute clarity . . . An easy five stars.
Quarterlife is that rare novel that dares to speak differently . . . Ambitious this novel certainly is, but its boldness is backed by Rege's unmistakable commitment to storytelling and her sheer talent for it.
The scope of the book's ideas and the textured rendering of its characters contribute an oceanic feeling of simultaneous scale and intimacy. It is akin to the sensation we experience when immersed in the great Russian fiction of the 19 century, and Ms. Rege joins Anglophone-Indian writers such as Neel Mukherjee and Vikram Chandra in bringing forth 21st-century novels that seem expressly modeled on that literary golden age.