BSI February selection

An Outline of the Republic by Siddhartha Deb  is a murky atmospheric tale of shifting politics and emotional ambivalence.  Amrit Singh, a nonpracticing Sikh and atheist, works half-heartedly as a journalist at a Delhi-based English language newspaper, The Sentinel.

In The Sentinel's news morgue, Singh stumbles across a photograph of two insurgents and their hostage, a young woman to be assassinated for being a porn actress. Singh journeys to the border region between India, Burma and Tibet in search of information about the alleged porn actress.

The physical and emotional terrain of Outline projects the reader into an existential no man’s land. Heroes and villains are conjured from rumors and rumors of rumors. What is real and true about the young woman, the saintly but shadowy Malik and even Singh himself is never exactly settled. The reader is left to make his or her own conclusions.

Siddhartha Deb  is the author of two novels, The Point of No Return (2002), which was a New York Times Notable Book, and An Outline of the Republic (2005), known as Surface in the UK and India. Aside from two novels, he is a regular book reviewer and journalist for the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Guardian and others.

Deb won the 2007 Dublin IMPAC award for Outline. He is currently a Radcliffe Institute fellow at Harvard University and is working on Do You Know Who I Am? Stories of Wealth and Poverty from the New India, a nonfiction book dealing with contemporary Indian society.