A stunning debut about Delhi, desire and how much we are prepared to risk for our freedom
Shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Medicis
Shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Medicis
My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken in the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn't there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping, and from the roadside dhaba where he'd been drinking all night.
Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle pages, one line standing out, the last one, in which a cop he'd never met said to the reporter, He was known to us, he was a bad character.
This is the story of Idha, a young woman who finds escape from the arranged marriage and security that her middle-class world has to offer through a chance encounter with a charismatic, dangerous young man. She is quickly exposed to the thrilling, often illicit pleasures that both the city, Delhi, and her body can hold. But as the affair continues, and her double life deepens, her lover's increasingly unstable behaviour carries them past the point of no return, where grief, love and violence threaten to transform his madness into her own.
A novel about female desire, A Bad Character shows us a Delhi we have not seen in fiction before: a city awash with violence, rage and corruption.
Industry Reviews
The title character of Deepti Kapoor's searing debut is dead by Line 1, but I still read A Bad Character in one frantic sitting... Intoxicating. -- Catherine Lacey * New York Times *
A stylishly written, powerfully moving love story, set against the bleak beauty and baroque decay of 21st century Delhi - its rubble, construction sites, wastelands, and the poisoned ooze of its dead river. What Twilight in Delhi is to the twentieth-century Indian novel, A Bad Character is to the twenty-first: the essence of India's corrupt capital, brilliantly and darkly distilled. This is a remarkable debut from a major new talent. -- William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal
Twenty-first-century Delhi needed a voice, and here it is, in all its dark majesty. A Bad Character comes as if from nowhere: it is an alchemical marvel, a novel of stunning beauty and originality. -- Rana Dasgupta
A Bad Character...captures [Delhi] in such perfect detail that I felt I could smell the food stalls, feel the crush of people and the heat rising from the pavements... As well as her transcendent eye for detail, the love story at the heart of this book is honest and deeply unsettling, making it a compelling read. -- Kerry Hudson * Herald *
A fiery, incandescent debut, A Bad Character artfully captures the fragmented psyche and perilous desires of a woman alone in New Delhi... [Kapoor's] writing has the flexible, lyrical cadence of a prose poem... A Bad Character is a powerful, psychologically acute, elegantly crafted debut that promises great things to come from Kapoor. -- Claire Fallon * Huffington Post *
