Tokyo Cancelled - Softcover

Dasgupta, Rana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802170099 ISBN 13: 9780802170095

Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005

Synopsis

Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they form a huddle by the silent baggage carousels and tell one another stories. Thus begins Rana Dasgupta's Canterbury Tales for our times.

In the spirit of Borges and Calvino, Dasgupta's writing combines an energetically modern landscape with a timeless, beguiling fairy-tale ethos, while bringing to life a cast of extraordinary individuals-some lost, some confused, some happy-in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, and wonderful.

A Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; Robert De Niro's son masters the transubstantiation of matter and turns it against his enemies; a man who manipulates other people's memories has to confront his own past; a Japanese entrepreneur risks losing everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl is left alone in the house of a German man who is mapping the world.

Told by people on a journey, these are stories about lives in transit, stories that grow into an epic cycle about the hopes and dreams and disappointments that connect people everywhere.

About this title

Review

‘Only the most gifted writers, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jonathan Safran-Foer, can hold the surreal and the real in satisfying equilibrium. This elite now welcomes Rana Dasgupta to its ranks. He makes magic realism his own, and his debut novel is superb. The novel's momentum comes from the narrators, though the plot in which they come together is deceptively mundane: their plane is grounded and they tell stories to pass the night. But this is just the structural glue for a series of spellbinding tales composed in a crisp but poetic prose which already has the hallmarks of a signature style. Dasgupta's gift for inventing stories is quite remarkable: you feel he could go on forever and never get boring. Tokyo Cancelled is profound, but in the humblest and most sensitive way. A treat.’ Andrew Staffell, Time Out 'Book of the Week'

‘Executed with elegance and charm’ The Guardian

‘This is a very bold, very striking book. In an age when so many first fictions are thinly veiled autobiography, and every other creative writing tutor is peddling the 'Write what you know' mantra, it is exceptionally refreshing to read a writer who is daring to imagine, rather than transcribe. Tokyo Cancelled is an unforgettable book, with its own peculiar charms. I shall be fascinated to see what happens next.’ Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

About the Author

rana dasgupta grew up in Cambridge, England. He worked for a marketing consultancy in London and New York for a few years before moving to Delhi to write. He lives there still.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802170099
• ISBN 13: 9780802170095
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400