Across the Lakes

Despite the seemingly unbridgeable social divides of Calcutta, a city where pleasure and indolence co-exist with extreme poverty, the lives of three young people are inextricably connected: by family, by proximity, by accident.

Political power play and corruption, petty local gangsterism, and the smell and color of Indian city life all combine with a delicate vein of humor in Amal Chatterjee's fluent first novel.