LEILA

Prayaag Akbar

In his first novel, Prayaag Akbar imagines a dystopian city of walls and guards, where communities and classes are systematically segregated into zones by the state, through which social purity is strictly maintained. Akbar’s city is an amalgam of present-day Delhi and Mumbai, as well as an imagined future space where the relative privilege and impunity of today’s elites suddenly comes undone. The novel taps into deep anxieties among India’s cosmopolitan elites by focussing on an upper-class mother’s search for her lost daughter.

Simon & Schuster india, 224 pages, Rs 599