Maximum City: Bombay Lost And Found (Winner Of Kiriyama Pacif

Description: Bombay's story, told through the lives, often desperately near the edge, of some of the people who live there. The complex texture of these extraordinary tales is threaded together by Suketu Mehta's own history of growing up in Bombay and returning to live there after a 21-year absence. Hitmen, dancing girls, cops, movie stars, poets, beggars and politicians - Suketu loooked at the city through their eyes, and in looking found the city within himself.

Review: 'And now Bombay gets its Boswell, his chronicle as sprawling and enchanting as his subject' -- India Today 20040901 'Sprawling, epic, vibrant--and more than a little scary--Maximum City does justice to its monumental subject... there's not a boring moment as Mehta's sparkling prose and prodigious descriptive powers make the distant city seem as vital to us as the neighborhood in which we live' Four Stars -- Francine Prose, People Magazine 20040901 'Brave, honest, and addictive' -- Mohsin Hamid 20040901 'He gives us a city that "is a mass dream of the peoples of India," and although the dream includes a few nightmares, he makes you never want to wake up' -- Shashi Tharoor, LA Times -- Shashi Tharoor, LA Times 20040901 'Like one of Bombay's teeming chawls, MAXIMUM CITY is part nightmare and part millennial hallucination, filled with detail, drama and a richly varied cast of characters. In his quest to plumb both the grimy depths and radiant heights of the continent that is Bombay, Suketu Mehta has taken travel writing to an entirely new level. This is a gripping, compellingly readable account of a love affair with a city: I couldn't put it down ' -- Amitav Ghosh 20040901 Gangsters, girls, movie stars. Jains so afraid of killing bacteria that they won't brush their teeth. Computer programmers trying to get to work and run-aways living on the sidewalk. There is almost nothing that this book doesn't reveal about Bombay in startling, emotional, and humorous detail. Along with V.S. Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City is probably the greatest non-fiction book written about India. -- Akhil Sharma 20040901 'The mother of all Mumbai books... stunningly written' -- Time Out Mumbai 20040901 'MAXIMUM CITY is the remarkable debut of a major new Indian writer. Humane and moving, sympathetic but outspoken, it's a shocking and sometimes heartbreaking book, teeming with extraordinary stories. It is unquestionably one of the most memorable non-fiction books to come out of India for many years, and there is little question that it will become the classic study of Bombay.' -- William Dalrymple 20040901 MAXIMUM CITY is at once paean and lament... a compelling account of a thriving city on the decline, faltering under the weight of its own success, even as it refuses to sink as it finally must' -- Village Voice 20040914 'Mehta writes with a Victorian novelist's genius for character, detail, and incident, but his voice is utterly modern. Like its subject, this is a sprawling banquet of a book, one of the most intimate and moving portraits of a place I have read' -- Jhumpa Lahiri 20040901 'The most riveting and impressive book I've read in months, but also one of the most potentially enduring' -- Pico Iyer 20040901 'A seething, rumbling, deeply compassionate break-dance of a book' -- The Hindu 20040901 'Much more than a travel book, it is an autopsy of a city that is morally dead... Mehta has... captured the psyche of the city' -- Globe and Mail 20040901 'A debut that will rival Arundhati Roy's in fiction' -- The Nation 20040901 'Brilliant... Mehta is the best kind of investigative reporter - a voyeur who knows the limits of voyeurism' -- Nell Freudenberger, US Vogue 20040901 'MAXIMUM CITY is billed as non-fiction, but it has the intensity and vividness of fiction. Suketu belongs in the ranks of Rohinton Mistry, of Vikram Chandra, of Arun Kolatkar and Salman Rushdie... one of the truly great debut books to come out of India' -- Nilanjana Roy, Business Standard, New Delhi 20040921 'Mehta fills his kaleidoscopic portrait... with captivating moments of danger and dismay... His sophisticated voice conveys post-modern Bombay with a carefully calibrated balance of wit and outrage, harking back to such great Victorian chroniclers as Dickens and Mayhew while introducing the reader to much that is truly new and strange' -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) 20040719 'Suketu Mehta's MAXIMUM CITY is quite extraordinary - he writes about Bombay with an unsparing ferocity born of his love, which I share, for the old pre-Mumbai city which has now been almost destroyed by corruption, gangsterism and neo-fascist politics, its spirit surviving in tiny moments and images which he seizes upon as proof of the survival of hope; and the quality of his investigative reportage, the skill with which he persuades hoodlums and murderers to open up to him, is quite amazing. It's the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis, my city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read' -- Salman Rushdie 'There is almost nothing that this book doesn't reveal about Bombay in startling, emotional, and humorous detail. Along with V.S. Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City is probably the greatest non-fiction book written about India.' -- Akhil Sharma '...unquestionably one of the most memorable non-fiction books to come out of India for many years, and there is little question that it will become the classic study of Bombay.' -- William Dalrymple 'MAXIMUM CITY is part nightmare and part millennial hallucination... Suketu Mehta has taken travel writing to an entirely new level. This is a gripping, compellingly readable account of a love affair with a city: I couldn't put it down ' -- Amitav Ghosh 'Suketu Mehta tells the stories of slum-dwellers, dancing girls, hitmen and poets, all of whom have come to Bombay to make it. With a clear but non-judgmental voice, his is an outstanding tale of the exhilarating city in which he grew up' -- Economist 'Maximum City is narrative reporting at its finest, probably the best work of nonfiction to come out of India in recent years ... The depth of Mehta's evocative and beautiful prose keeps things lively. Indeed, Mehta's most impressive skill lies not in his documentary prowess but in the psychological acuity of his writing: we come away from his encounters feeling we know the inner lives of the people he has depicted. In this sense, Maximum City is more than a consideration of the material limits on urban living; it is a profound meditation on the existential (and even spiritual) longings that persist despite those limits' -- New York Times Book Review


Prizes: Winner of Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize - Non-Fiction 2005.
Shortlisted for Guardian First Book Award 2005 and Samuel Johnson Prize 2005.

Author Biography: Suketu Mehta was born in Calcutta in 1963, and after doing a post-graduate degree at Iowa now lives in New York. His work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New Yorker and Granta.