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Bohemian rhapsody: Jeet Thayil, shortlisted for Booker Prize previously, is back with a new novel

Jeet Thayil's new novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, is an ode to '70s Bombay, and to the artists that lit it up.

Five years after poet Jeet Thayil's debut novel Narcopolis made the shortlist for the Booker Prize, he's back with a long, winding follow up, The Book of Chocolate Saints. It has been a work long in the making, carved out (or vice versa) from the initial draft of Narcopolis, which was a Knausgaard like 1000+ page outpouring of autofiction, an attempt to memorialise in print the Bombay Thayil knew as it was erased. For long time denizens, cities are palimpsests,

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