Indian author Rahul Bhattacharya has won a prize awarded by The Hindu newspaper for Best Fiction of 2011.
The book – The Sly Company of People who Care – which has been applauded here and abroad tells of a young Indian’s Caribbean adventures in the company of a Guyanese diamond-hunter. According to The Hindu it won the prize for “its consummate artistry, its refusal to exoticise India — or Guyana … and its non-judgmental attitude to the characters.”
The Sly Company of People who Care details the life of its twenty-six- year old main character. The Hindu said that in presenting the prize to the Delhi-based author, writer and MP Shashi Tharoor said it was important to support the efforts of The Hindu to celebrate good writing in English in fiction, particularly as the challenge of getting people to read in an increasingly television-dominated culture was a formidable one.
Accepting the award, Bhattacharya, who is also a cricket writer, joked that he was feeling a bit like (Mohinder) Amarnath running through the West Indies line-up in 1983.
A description of the book on Amazon.com said that “In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty.
Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world.
Ultimately, to fulfill his purpose, he prepares to mount an adventure of his own. His journey takes him beyond Guyanese borders, and his companion will be the feisty, wild-haired Jan.”
“In this dazzling novel, propelled by a singularly forceful voice, Rahul Bhattacharya captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, and the paradoxes of searching for life’s meaning in the escape from home,” the review said.
The book has been reviewed by several top publications and critics and has been generally well-received. “Bhattacharya’s distinctive voice, which incorporates both Guyanese and Indian dialects, results in an authentic and sybaritic tale,” said Publishers Weekly.
The New Yorker said: “Bhattacharya’s gift for reproducing the rhythms and intricacies of his characters’ speech…places him in the company of Mark Twain. He understands the world by listening to it.”
“This ferociously gifted writer has already been hailed as the natural successor to the great Naipaul – and yes, he is that good.
His narrator has a charming, confident voice that engages instantly and his descriptions of landscapes and people are ravishing,” according to the review in the UK Times.
“He has written the definitive delineation of Guyanese culture in an enthralling book… that will utterly captivate readers, particularly the ones with Guyanese blood in their veins,” Sunday’s Stabroek columnist and singer, Dave Martins wrote.