IN flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world. A dazzling novel, propelled by a singularly forceful voice, Rahul Bhattacharya captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, and the paradoxes of searching for life’s meaning in the escape from home.
Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2012
Winner of the Hindu Literary Prize 2011Shortlisted for:
the Man Asian Literary Prize,
the Commonwealth Book Prize, and
the Economist Crossword Book AwardA Kirkus Fiction Book of the Year in the US
More about the Book
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The DSC and Impac Dublin longlists
The DSC and Impac Dublin longlists The Sly Company of People Who Care on two longlists, one much longer than the other. — Read More…
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Going back home in your mind
Dave Martins, Stabroek News Getting inside a culture and unravelling it for someone is tough enough if you’re from that culture. For someone outside the culture, the unravelling is virtually impossible, but a writer from India, Rahul Bhattacharya, has done it. He has written the definitive delineation of Guyanese culture in an enthralling book – “The — Read More…
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The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2012
Rahul Bhattacharya wins the £10,000 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize with his first novel The Sly Company of People Who Care (Picador) 2012 judges Nick Laird, Michèle Roberts and Kamila Shamsie admired ‘Bhattacharya’s verve and style as he brilliantly evokes the history and inhabitants and landscape of Guyana’. Nick Laird said he had ‘seldom read a book with so — Read More…
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Winner, 2012 RSL Ondaatje Prize
“On almost every page there were little stylistic twists or felicities which had me stopping to admire them.” Nick Laird, Judge — Read More…
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Shortlisted, the 2012 RSL Ondaatje Prize
The Sly Company of People Who Care finds its way to the shortlist of the prize for a ‘book of place’ — Read More…
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Commonwealth Book Prize
Commonwealth Book Prize The Sly Company of People Who Care is shortlisted. Writers on their books here. — Read More…
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The Hindu Literary Prize
The Sly Company of People Who Care won the Hindu Literary Prize for Best Fiction 2011. Here is the shortlist, and below, the award citation. A link to an interview with The Hindu SHORTLIST Bharathipura, translated work of U.R. Ananthamurthy, translated by Sushila Punitha The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya The — Read More…
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Reviews for “The Sly Company of People Who Care”
USA & The Caribbean ‘What a voice, what a startling, funny, charming, provocative voice! Rahul Bhattacharya’s narrator is a true wanderer and a gifted poet of description. The journey he takes us on, through Guyana, through histories and selves, is a wonder.’ – Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask ‘Exuberant and often arresting… What a remarkable — Read More…
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The Sly Company of People Who Care
A dazzling novel, propelled by a singularly forceful voice, Rahul Bhattacharya captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, and the paradoxes of searching for life’s meaning in the escape from home. Winner of the Ondaatje Prize, and the Hindu Literary Prize — Read More…