Jeet Thayil Books in Order

Around an opium den in Bombay, addicts, poets, criminals and drifters move through a city undergoing decades of change. Their intersecting lives explore desire, violence and belonging as older rituals of intoxication give way to new dangers.

This volume gathers more than three decades of Jeet Thayil’s poetry, including work from his earlier collections and poems previously circulated privately. Changes in form and voice trace his continuing engagement with memory, loss and the possibilities of language.

Aging painter and former poet Newton Francis Xavier returns from New York to India with his partner for a final exhibition. Their journey opens onto the lives of artists, addicts and outsiders, exposing the desires and damage behind his reputation.

After his wife’s suicide, Dominic Ullis travels to Bombay seeking oblivion in drugs and reckless encounters. Over a disorienting weekend, the city’s extremes and its unpredictable inhabitants draw him through grief toward either self-destruction or a different understanding of loss.

Fifteen women whose lives intersected with Christ’s tell their stories, restoring perspectives marginalised in familiar accounts of the New Testament. Their devotion, doubts and actions reveal a radical message of equality and the power threatened by its survival.