The Death of Mr. Love: A Novel - Hardcover

Sinha, Indra

3.46

248 ratings by Goodreads

9780060562465: The Death of Mr. Love: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060562463 ISBN 13: 9780060562465

Publisher: William Morrow, 2004

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In a family of storytellers, there was one tale never told ... "Call this story fiction if you want, but you must tell it because it is true, and at its heart is that murder of forty years ago which people in India still remember ... "

The Death of Mr. Love, a novel inspired by a true story where the victim became a villain and the killer became a hero, offers a rare and fascinating insight into the psychosexual undercurrents of Indian life.

The reverberations from the notorious Nanavati society murder in 1950s Bombay -- the fatal consequence of an affair between an Indian playboy and his married English lover -- were so great that they reached the offices of Prime Minister Nehru and changed the face of the Indian justice system irrevocably. What is not known -- has never been known -- is that a second, connected crime, so cruel that it destroyed the lives of two women, went unreported and has remained unpunished. Until now.

In present-day London the women's children unexpectedly meet forty years after their idyllic childhood in India. Driven by grief, anger, or a deeper emotion they are unwilling to confront, they return to India to uncover the mystery of the crime that caused their mothers' suffering and exact their cold revenge. But in the bazaars of today's Bombay, a city racked and burned by communal riots, their adversary still enjoys huge power, and the friends soon find themselves in real, terrifying danger.

Spanning two continents and encompassing the secrets of fifty years, The Death of Mr. Love fuses myth and murder, fact and fiction. It is a tale of stories that "begin before their beginnings, and continue beyond their ends."

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About the Author:

Indra Sinha was born in India and educated at Mayo College, Rajasthan, and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He lives in Sussex, England, and is a full-time writer.

From Booklist:

Drawing on the real-life murder of an Indian playboy in 1950s Bombay, first-novelist Sinha examines the effects of the past on a mild-mannered London bookseller, Bhalu, whose encounter with a childhood friend, Phoebe, at his mother's funeral rekindles questions about what prompted their parents to leave India. Jumping between the past--as reconstructed through the journals of Phoebe's mother--and the growing crisis in Bhalu's marriage, the novel slowly, hypnotically, unravels the story of a hidden crime, lost in the wake of the playboy's murder, a crime that could hold the answers to all Bhalu and Phoebe's lingering questions. Life in Bombay, in the present and in the years following India's emancipation, is evoked in a rainstorm of sensual detail, as Bhalu and Phoebe attempt to solve the decades-old mystery and, simultaneously, make sense of their feelings for one another. Sinha sometimes seems to lose control of her many-tentacled story, but the reader's interest is held by the simmering passions and the vivid atmospherics. A most promising debut, even if the author's reach slightly exceeds his grasp. Bill Ott
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