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Jeet Thayil´s follow-up to his bestselling Man Booker-shortlisted debut Narcopolis is a strange and beautiful hymn to the artistic life lived fearlessly.

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´Easily the most original and formally inventive novel to come out of India in years.´ Salman Rushdie, Guardian

Francis Newton Xavier has lived a wild existence of excess in pursuit of his uncompromising aesthetic vision. His paintings and poems - which embody the flamboyant and decadent jeu d´esprit of his heroes like Baudelaire - have forged his reputation, which is to be celebrated at a new show in Delhi.

Approaching middle age in a body ravaged by hard-living, Xavier leaves Manhattan following the 9/11 attacks with his young girlfriend - and his journey home to India becomes a delirious voyage into the past. From his formative years with an infamous school offin de siècle Bombay poets - as documented by his biographer, Diswas, in these pages - Xavier must move forward into an uncertain future of salvation or damnation.

His story results in The Book of Chocolate Saints: an epic novel of contemporary Indian life that probes the mysterious margins where art bleeds into the occult, and celebrates the artist´s life itself as a final monument. It is Jeet Thayil´s spiritual, passionate, and demented masterpiece.

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´This novel is a rich harvest; it moves with the strange and flawless certainty of a dream ... It is superbly written, and its madness is also its strength.´ Edna O´Brien

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Thayil, Jeet
Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala, India in 1959 and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Bombay. He is a songwriter and guitarist, and has published four collections of poetry. He is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). He currently lives in New Delhi.

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