The Book of Chocolate Saints

In incandescent prose, award-winning novelist Jeet Thayil tells the story of Newton Francis Xavier, blocked poet, serial seducer of young women, reformed alcoholic (but only just), philosopher, recluse, all-round wild man and India’s greatestiving painter. At the age of sixty-six, Xavier, who has beeniving in New York, is getting ready to return to theand of his birth to stage one final show of his work (accompanied by a mad bacchanal). As we accompany Xavier and his partner and muse ‘Goody’ on their unsteady and frequently sidetracked journey from New York to New Delhi, the venue of the final show, we meet a host of memorable characters—the Bombay poets of the seventies and eighties, ‘poets who sprouted from the soilike weeds or mushrooms or carnivorous new flowers, who arrivedike meteors, burned bright for a season or two and vanished without a trace’, journalists, conmen, murderers, alcoholics, addicts, artists, whores, societyadies, thugs—and are also given unforgettable (and sometimes unbearable) insights intoove, madness, poetry, sex, painting, saints, death, God and the savagery that fuels all great art. Narrated in a huge variety of voices and styles, all of which blend seamlessly into a novel of remarkable accomplishment, The Book of Chocolate Saints is the sort ofiterary masterpiece that only comes along once in a veryong time.