Solo

(Paperback)

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Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

The new novel from the critically acclaimed author of Tokyo Cancelled.
Solo recounts the life and daydreams of a reclusive one-hundred-year-old man from Bulgaria.

Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.

Wondering if, unlike the hapless parrots, he has any wisdom to leave to the world, Ulrich embarks on an epic armchair journey through a century of violent politics, forbidden music, lost love and failed chemistry, finding his way eventually to an astonishing epiphany of tenderness and enlightenment.

Reviews

A novel of exceptional, astonishing strangeness, Solo confirms Rana Dasgupta as the most unexpected and original Indian writer of his generation. Salman Rushdie

This gloriously eccentric adventure through a century of Bulgarian history is so much fun to read youll hardly realise how much youre learningWeird, wonderful and warmly wise stuff. Daily Mail

[The novels] breathtaking poignancy makes it worth every moment of concentration. Scotsman

Solo is a nuanced and virtuoso performance. Scotland on Sunday

[An] exhilarating visionary featWhen I finished it I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it all over again. Sunday Business Post

In this deliriously sad, bewitching novel, Dasgupta updates the magic realism of the subcontinent, and brings it fully formed into a new century. Metro

With delicately judged poignancy, Rana Dasgupta captures the pasts fading from the mind. TLS

Author Bio

Rana Dasgupta was born in 1971, and grew up in Cambridge. He worked for a marketing consultancy in London and New York for a few years before moving to Delhi to write. His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled, a thirteen-part story cycle, was published in 2005 to widespread acclaim and has been translated into nine languages. Dasgupta now lives permanently in Delhi, and writes for several periodicals, including the Guardian, New Statesman and BBC radio.