Low

Jeet Thayil

From the Booker-shortlisted author: one man’s whirlwind weekend of self-destructive grief.

2 in stock

£14.00
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780571356416
Date Published
31.08.2022
Delivery
All orders are sent via Royal Mail and are tracked: choose from standard or premium delivery.
Summary

Ullis went to the bathroom and carefully unfolded the business card and placed it on the sink. Then he rolled up a note and snorted the last of his wife’s ashes.

Following the death of his wife, Dominic Ullis escapes to Bombay in search of oblivion and a dangerous new drug, Meow Meow. So begins a glorious weekend of misadventure as he tours the teeming, kaleidoscopic city from its sleek eyries of high-capital to the piss-stained streets, encountering a cast with their own stories to tell, but none of whom Ullis – his faculties ever distorted – is quite sure he can trust.

Heady, heartbroken and heartfelt, Low is a blazing joyride through the darklands of grief towards obliteration – and, perhaps, epiphany.

‘Jeet Thayil delights not just in pushing the bounds of possibility, but in smashing them to smithereens.’ John Burnside

Critic Reviews

Surprisingly colourful and enjoyable . . . Low offers vicarious kicks without the comedown

Critic Reviews

A novel of our times . . . Low is beautifully written, intelligent and gripping, and elicits compassion for a character who is pitifully adrift

Critic Reviews

Intoxication is difficult to write about with clarity and without self-indulgence. Only a few writers succeed in making hallucinatory reveries or amphetamine-fuelled adventures engaging for the reader. But there are glorious exceptions in modern fiction, such as the American Denis Johnson and the Chilean Roberto Bolaño — and after three novels in which drugs feature heavily, the Indian writer Jeet Thayil is another . . . Thayil writes about his city with the kind of deep affinity and close attention that Orhan Pamuk displays in his novels set in Istanbul.

Critic Reviews

Tender and moving . . . is a vigorous and enjoyable book that carries the reader along with pace and exuberance. The themes of Low might hail from the depths, but reading it elicits a peculiar high.

Critic Reviews

Where Low achieves its own highs is in Thayil’s descriptions of drug-taking . . . Time dissolves and language is given an extra shimmer; the world warps into a brand new shape. The result is not just another novel about taking drugs. At times it reads more like a novel that has taken them.

Critic Reviews

[A] lively evocation of India’s most overblown metropolis

Critic Reviews

Very good on drugs . . . even better on Trump . . . demonstrates Thayil thinking, very cleverly, inside the box, and largely inside Dom’s and his own head

Critic Reviews

[An] immersive tale of grief and oblivion that recalls Malcolm Lowry’s classic Under the Volcano

Critic Reviews

[A] lively evocation of India’s most overblown metropolis . . . [and] scorching diatribes against the country’s corrupt rulers

Critic Reviews

Set against a backdrop of misadventure and a kaleidoscope of colourful characters, Low is as exhilarating as it is unputdownable.

Critic Reviews

A madcap, trippy ride to the dark abyss of grief.

JeetThayil

Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala, India in 1959 and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Bombay. He is a songwriter and guitarist, and has published four collections of poetry. He is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). He currently lives in New Delhi.

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