Vikram Chandra divides his time between India and Berkeley, where he teaches writing. Even Chandra finds its surreal that HarperCollins has paid him $1 million for his new novel, Sacred Games, a mammoth (898 pages) thriller hyped as an Indian version of The Godfather. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
In India, the book has spent months at the top of the best-seller list. In the United States, readers of “Sacred Games” will have to adapt not only to the pace of a leisurely suspense novel but also to Chandra’s lush, decidedly non-Western prose — English sprinkled with words in Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and several other languages.
“I wanted very much to use the same language that I would use if I were sitting in a bar in Bombay, telling the story to one of my friends,” he says.
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