Chowringhee

'Here, day and night were interchangeable. The immaculately dressed Chowringhee, radiant in her youth, had just stepped on to the floor at the nightclub.' Set in 1950s Calcutta, Chowringhee is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta's largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Written by best-selling Bengali author Sankar, Chowringhee was published in 1962. Predating Arthur Hailey's Hotel by three years, it became an instant hit, spawning translations in major Indian languages, a film and a play. Its larger-than-life characters - the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose, the tragic hostess Karabi Guha, among others - soon attained cult status. With its thinly veiled accounts of the private lives of real-life celebrities, and its sympathetic narrative seamlessly weaving the past and the present, it immediately established itself as a popular classic.

Sankar - the pen-name of Mani Sankar Mukherji - is one of Bengal's most widely read modern novelists. Two of his novels, Seemabaddha (Company Limited) and JanaAranya (The Middleman) were filmed by Satyajit Ray. He lives in Kolkata (Calcutta).