He draws from his life to populate his first novel, Narcopolis, with a cast of desperate, damaged and magnetic. According to The Guardian, 'Narcopolis is a blistering debut that can indeed stand proudly on the shelf next to Burroughs and De Quincey. A former addict, Jeet Thayil spent decades in Mumbai's seedy, drug-ridden underworld. Highly regarded as one of the leading postmodern poets of India, Thayil expertly weaves poetry and prose in this breakthrough work. But this put bad feelings into me.' Thayil decided to call the book Narcopolis 'because Bombay seemed to me a city of intoxication, where the substances on offer were drugs and alcohol, of course, but also god, glamour, power, money and sex'. The Publisher Says: Jeet Thayils luminous debut novel completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. A sprawling series of vignettes on characters like an opium addict, a eunuch named Dimple and a poet-slash-artist, the book takes the reader through the seedy underbelly of the city. it took him five years to write the novel, and he called it 'the opposite of catharsis. Beginning in the 1970s and carrying us to the recent past, Narcopolis is a haunting, hallucinatory novel about Bombay’s opium culture. Thayil offers a series of vignettes, at times gritty and raw, at times melodious and soft. The novel draws on his own experiences as a drug addict, and what he calls 'the lost 20 years of my life'. Narcopolis doesn’t seem to have a plot, which makes it a difficult read at times. The story expands to encompass such characters as Dimple, a hijra, Rashid, the opium house's owner, and Mr Lee, a former Chinese officer, all of whom have stories to tell. Above all, it is a fantastical portrait of a beautiful and damned generation in a nation about to sell its soul. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with that of the subcontinent's familiar literary lights. The novel's narrator arrives in Bombay, where he becomes seduced into the opium underground. It is a book about drugs, sex, death, perversion, addiction, love, and God and has more in common in its subject matter with the work of William S.

It is set in 1970s Old Bombay and concerns opium and its influence. Narcopolis is the debut novel of Indian author Jeet Thayil, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize.

Narcopolis book