Description

Spanning twenty-four years in the lives of five college friends — from a hostel rooftop at St. Stephen’s in 1999 to a hospital corridor in Gurgaon in 2023 — *The Long Indian Summer* is the ambitious, deeply felt portrait of a generation that, by every reasonable measure, was supposed to have inherited a better country.

There is Sameer, the small-town topper who joined the IAS and was, by his forty-fifth birthday, quietly disillusioned with everything he had once believed administration could do. There is Anaita, the Bombay journalist who broke three major stories in her thirties and lost her career to a defamation case in her forties. There is Devraj, the kindest of them, who joined his father’s Kanpur leather business and watched it die over a decade of policy whiplash. There is Tara, who married into an old Delhi family and slowly, articulately, came apart inside it. And there is Imran, the rich, beautiful, slightly cruel friend who left for New York in 2001 and came home, two decades later, to die.

Told across one final summer in which the surviving four meet again, in Imran’s last weeks, in a high-floor Gurgaon flat with a view of the Aravalli haze, *The Long Indian Summer* is a sweeping, generous, devastating novel about love, ambition, friendship and the slow ideological exhaustion of a generation that had, once, expected so much more of itself.

An indispensable Indian novel for our moment.