"Spine chilling ... written with flair and clear-eyed acidity."
-- The New Yorker
Based on actual events, The Story of My Assassins tells the story of a journalist who learns that the police have captured five hitmen on their way to kill him. Landing like a bombshell on his comfortable life, just as he's started a steamy affair with a brilliant woman, the news prompts him to launch an urgent investigation into the lives of his aspiring murderers--a ragtag group of street thugs and village waifs--and their mastermind. Who wanted him dead, and why?
But the investigation forces him to reexamine his own life, too--to confront his own notion of himself, his job, and his treatment of the women in his life, as well as his own complex feelings about the country that crafted his would-be killers.
Part thriller and part erotic romance, full of dark humor and knife-edged suspense, The Story of My Assassins is a piercing literary novel that takes us from the lavish, hedonistic palaces of India's elite to its seediest slums. It is a novel of corruption, passion, power, and ambition; of extreme poverty and obscene wealth.
It is an awesome adventure into the heart of today's India.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 25, 2012 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781612191638
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781612191638
- File size: 2589 KB
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Accessibility
No publisher statement provided -
Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from July 30, 2012
Tejpal’s masterful U.S. debut is an epic tale of modern-day India and its labyrinthine social and political machinations. Superficially, it’s the story of an unnamed muckraking journalist, embroiled in an affair, who learns of an assassination attempt on his life. As he investigates his would-be murderers’ motives, the stories of the five young men hired to kill him come to light; meanwhile, the author exposes the internecine workings of the Indian judicial system and deftly makes heroes of the disparate bunch of hit men, despite the trouble left in their respective wakes. While the narrator is an engaging focal character, the book works on many levels: it is a sweeping indictment of government bureaucracy, a revelation of the layered consequences of revenge, an exposé of the stunning violence visited upon victims of circumstance, and a brazen censure of how technology has quashed imagination—it is also a philosophical treatise on how to live one’s life to the fullest, ending with an ironic shift that will find the journalist owing his life to what he once scorned. Agent: Andrew Kidd, Aitken Alexander.
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