The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

About this book

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 lifes meaning in the escape from home. The Sly Company of People Who Care is the winner of the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the 2011 Hindu Literary Prize. It was shortlisted for 2011 The Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize and was selected as a Kansas City Star Best Fiction Book of the Year and a Kirkus Best Fiction Book of the Year.