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With an imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance that puts him in the company of David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century though the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that announces the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction.
In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father's fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams - and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich’s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.
Intertwining science and heartbreak, the old world and the new, the real and imagined, Solo is a virtuoso work.
"Starred Review. Lucid prose and a narrative scheme both demanding and inchoate reveal a writer beginning to deploy his considerable powers." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Graceful and unpredictable, a daring and exceptional achievement." - Kirkus Reviews
"In Solo – which is ultimately a meditation on what it means to measure success, failure and time itself – Rana Dasgupta, a member of The Telegraph’s "20 Writers Under 40 to Watch" list, has created a work that is both literary and compelling, a prize-worthy feat indeed." - The Globe & Mail (Canada)
"The fact ... remains that an otherwise lovely book has 150 pages of stodge - its whole length again – tacked on at the end. It's very nearly something very special. But not quite." - The Guardian (UK)
"With an intriguing bifurcated storytelling device, this is a novel of dazzling ideas and emotion in which Dasgupta comes to astonishingly beautiful and original conclusions about love, loss, and aging..." - Booklist
This information about Solo was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rana Dasgupta was born in the UK in 1971 and grew up in Cambridge. As an adult he lived in France, Malaysia and the US before moving to Delhi in 2000.
His first book, Tokyo Cancelled, was published in 2005. Narrated by travelers stuck for a night in an airport, it is a cycle of folktales about our contemporary world of globalization, corporations, film stars and illegal immigrants. It was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Vodafone Crossword Award. Solo, his first book published in the USA, came out in the UK in 2009 and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
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