THE BOOK OF CHOCOLATE SAINTS

In incandescent prose,
award-winning novelist Jeet Thayil tells the story of Newton Francis Xavier,
blocked poet, serial seducer of young women, reformed alcoholic (but only
just), philosopher, recluse, all-round wild man and India?s greatest living
painter. At the age of sixty-six, Xavier, who has been living in New York, is
getting ready to return to the land of his birth to stage one final show of
his work (accompanied by a mad bacchanal). As we accompany Xavier and his
partner and muse ?Goody? on their unsteady and frequently sidetracked journey
from New York to New Delhi, the venue of the final show, we meet a host of
memorable characters?the Bombay poets of the seventies and eighties, ?poets
who sprouted from the soil like weeds or mushrooms or carnivorous new
flowers, who arrived like meteors, burned bright for a season or two and
vanished without a trace?, journalists, conmen, murderers, alcoholics,
addicts, artists, whores, society ladies, thugs?and are also given
unforgettable (and sometimes unbearable) insights into love, madness, poetry,
sex, painting, saints, death, God and the savagery that fuels all great art.
Narrated in a huge variety of voices and styles, all of which blend
seamlessly into a novel of remarkable accomplishment, The Book of Chocolate
Saints is the sort of literary masterpiece that only comes along once in a
very long time.