Across the Lakes by Amal Chatterjee
Despite the seemingly unbridgeable social divides of Culcutta, a city where pleasure and indolence coexist with extreme poverty, three young people are inextricably connected, by family, by proximity, by accident. Political power play and corruption, petty local gangsterism, the smell and colour of Indian city life, all combine with a delicate vein of humour in this fluent first novel