A brilliant young writer from India with a funny, moving debut that perfectly captures the perils of online culture
'Truly infectious' -Guardian
Appa and Amma have driven home a shiny new Honda Civic to show off to their neighbours in Blue Hills housing colony. But their triumph is short lived. Their eldest son Sreenath is behaving strangely, and the reason soon becomes clear: a secretly filmed video of Sreenath and his girlfriend Anita has been posted to a porn site, and nearly everyone they know has seen it.
The ensuing war - with Sreenath and Anita on one side and their families on the other - becomes a news sensation, emblematic of a wider generational struggle. The novel is narrated by Sreenath's younger brother, just as eager to rebel against conventional morality. But to keep his family together he will have to compromise his integrity and, in doing so, bring buried tensions between him and his brother to the surface.
Full of dark comedy and insight about shame and the online generation, this is a poignant story about now told by a narrator who will beguile and surprise you.
Short-listed for Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2023 (UK)
'Our narrator's acerbic observations inject a truly infectious energy into the prose. Humorous and heartwarming ... a fresh take on the family drama, the internet novel and the comedy of manners.' - Guardian
'A sparkling debut, full of tenderness and mischief. It's as if Roth and Narayan had a baby' - Aatish Taseer, author of The Way Things Were
'Humorous, insightful and enormously touching . . . an exquisite debut' - Clare Allan, author of Poppy Shakespeare
'Laugh-out-loud funny - a beguiling debut by a writer of great charm.' - Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies
'One of the wittiest, cleverest, most perceptive books I've read about India in years. An acidic comedy of manners, an anarchic demolition of modern Indian mores, as well as a melancholic, sweet-sour love story about the impossibility of being young.' - Rahul Raina, author of How to Kidnap the Rich
Aravind Jayan is from Trivandrum, Kerala. His writing has been published in Out of Print, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Helter Skelter's Anthology IV, and The Hindu, among others. He is the 2017 winner of the Toto Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2021. He lives in Bangalore.
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