The Sly Company of People Who Care

Winner of the Hindu Literary Prize for Best Fiction 2011

About the Book: The Sly Company of People Who Care

A truly remarkable and original novel of self-discovery, set in a country of great contrasts.

A twenty-six-year-old Indian cricket journalist decides to give up his job and travel to a country where he can 'escape the deadness of his life'. So he arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Guyana is a complex country, a place with a foothold in both South America and the Caribbean, and the narrator soon experiences its many charms and contradictions. From the beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, through coastal sugar-cane plantations, to the dark rainforest interior home to a secretive society of diamond-hunters, he is absorbed by this fantastic world. But he is not just seduced by the country: he is also captivated by the feisty and dangerous Jan and together they embark on an adventure which takes them to a new country and a new life.

In this dazzling and ambitious debut novel, Rahul Bhattacharya has created a story that follows the shape and rhythms of life, not art. In the manner of Don Quixote, this is a picaresque narrative that 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 Sly Company of Peoplw Who Care is a first person narrative about a cricket journalist who takes a year off from his job and moves to Guyana. This is all there is to the plot, really-no baggage of past lovers, arch-enemies or estranged parents. As the lone narrator wanders through this wonderland, he builds a sense of adventure, surrealism, love, empathy and passion. The book is a sum of the adventure of being in a place where everything is turned upside down and one has to navigate by improvising; the whole book is summed up insightfully when the narrator writes, "Life was attitude to circumstance. no more no less".

About the Author: Rahul Bhattacharya

Rahul Bhattacharya was born in 1979. A cricket journalist since 2000, he is now a contributing editor with Wisden Asia Cricket and has been writing for the Wisden Almanack since 2003, when he compiled the series overview of India in England, 2002. He also writes for the Guardian.

Rahul has won a Crossword prize in the past for Pundits from Pakistan.

Reviews

It was mostly the promise of part-travelogue, part-fiction, part the portrayal of surrealism of a new place and a new life. The book appealed to me at a special level because my first honest passion really is wandering-Rachet Kinger, Author of Zapp: The Squirrel Who wanted to Fly