The Last Song of Dusk

Now available again, the best-selling and award winning novel, called A lush, wildly imaginative fairy tale” (San Francisco Chronicle).

For readers of The White Tiger and The God of Small Things, a dazzling, exuberant, wickedly funny, and moving novel set in post-colonial India that tells tender and enthralling tale of sex, karma, colonialism and, most of all, love in its many guises.

Anuradha Patwardhan is a young woman of such legendary beauty the peacocks line up to bid her farewell when she leaves her family home to meet her future husband. As part of her dowry, she carries with her a gift for singing songs so alluring, it is said even the moon listens. Her suitor, Vardhmaan, is a well-to-do doctor so handsome, serious, and dashing that girls feign fevers to be examined by him. If it seems only a fairy-tale marriage could befit such a couple,The Last Song of Dusk tells the far darker and deeper story of a love shaped by kismet and freighted with tragedy, passion, and loss. When their first child dies in a horrible accident, their lives being to unravel, and they seek to start anew in a heartbroken old villa by the sea, where their second child is born. Into their family comes a willful girl, with a taste for scandal and a trace of leopard blood in her veins. With her in their midst and shaking up Bombay’s status quo, they learn to navigate the ever changing landscape of love.

Written with an exhilarating verve for language and featuring appearances by Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, and the father of Bollywood moviesas well as one very malicious parrotThe Last Song of Duskis an outrageously original novel by a writer of enormous talent. A number one best-seller in India, it has received a Betty Trask Award for debut novels in the United Kingdom.

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, a born and bred Bombaywallah, was educated in India, England, and America. A past contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and Elle, he divides his time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Bombay.