Overview

Quarterlife is a groundbreaking portrait of a nation on the cusp of a new age. A group of young people converge in Mumbai after an election brings the divisive Bharat Party to power: Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant lured home by the promise of “better days,” is accompanied by Amanda, a restless New Englander eager to live her ideals through a social impact fellowship in a slum. Meanwhile, Naren’s brother Rohit, the charismatic talent scout, sets out to explore his roots in the countryside and falls in with the fiery young men that drive the Hindu nationalist machine. As they each come to grips with the new India, their journeys coalesce into a riveting milieu characterized by brutal debates and desires as fraught as they are compulsive. The result is an ever-widening chorus that feeds into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets—and the simmering unrest erupts. Quarterlife is as sweeping as it is intimate. With grace and precision, Devika Rege lays bare the moral and psychological roots of political belief in a time of reckoning for democracies worldwide. No one is spared, not even the writer. An urgent and prismatic debut, Quarterlife announces Rege as an evocative new voice in fiction and an author who is unafraid to test the limits of what the novel can achieve.

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9781324095491

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Reviews

"""Quarterlife promises to be an essential read for this moment in history."" -- Literary Hub ""An ambitious, unusual, formally risky novel that attempts nothing less than a full-scale portrait of India circa 2014. About a quarter of the way through, it opens out into something odder, incorporating many more characters, a more panoptic view of India on the cusp of becoming a world power. Rege is a talented young writer, finely attuned to the psychology of her characters...A promising first outing by a skilled writer."" -- Kirkus Reviews ""Rege gamely tackles India’s caste system and the elites’ blasé response to the rising threat to minorities under the Bharat Party... she pulls off some beautiful and kaleidoscopic set pieces, such as her depiction of Ganeshotsav. Readers will want to keep an eye out for what Rege does next."" -- Publisher's Weekly ""What a blazingly original voice, what a fiercely intelligent engagement with contemporary world politics and culture. Devika Rege is at the forefront of a new generation of authors who are challenging received notions of what transnational literature can do and remaking global literary culture in the process."" -- Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Immortal King Rao ""An exploration of the relationship of the self with the nation in the fashion of the big novels of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh. . . [Rege’s] biggest achievement is her fidelity to her object of exploration and her refusal to make aesthetic concessions in its representation. She resists the fictionalist’s urge to simplify. . ."" -- Anuradha Marwah, Biblio ""A landmark novel. ... Rege has a vast descriptive repertoire, is willing to take astonishing risks with structure, and is immaculate in her numerous interiority dives. Her hand is so sure, it’s often impossible to believe that Quarterlife is a debut."" -- Tanuj Solanki, The Indian Express ""What’s especially exciting is the freshness in Rege’s turn of phrase—the rhythm in her sentences feels new, and marks the arrival of a voice we have not heard before in Indian literature in English."" -- Swati Daftuar, The Hindu ""Dazzling, sophisticated, and wholly achieved in its ambition. .?.?. Devika Rege is a transformative novelist."" -- Maureen McLane, author of More Anon"

"""Quarterlife promises to be an essential read for this moment in history."" -- Literary Hub ""An ambitious, unusual, formally risky novel that attempts nothing less than a full-scale portrait of India circa 2014. About a quarter of the way through, it opens out into something odder, incorporating many more characters, a more panoptic view of India on the cusp of becoming a world power. Rege is a talented young writer, finely attuned to the psychology of her characters...A promising first outing by a skilled writer."" -- Kirkus Reviews"

Author Information

Devika Rege is the author of Quarterlife. The novel came out in India in 2023, where it was hailed as 'a landmark novel' by The Indian Express. It was also a finalist for five literary awards, eventually winning the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award and the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman. It will be published in the USA and elsewhere in 2024. Devika is a graduate of the universities of Mumbai and Iowa, and lives in Bangalore.

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