Maximum City: Bombay Lost And Found

Winner of the 2005 Kiriyama Prize for Non-fiction



Suketu Mehta left Bombay at the age of 14. Twenty-one years later he returned to rediscover the city. The result is this stunning, brilliantly illuminating portrait of the megalopolis and its people—a book, seven years in the making, that is as vast, as diverse, as rich in experience, incident and sensation as the city itself.



‘Extraordinary . . . the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis’—Salman Rushdie



‘Like one of Bombay’s teeming chawls, Maximum City is part nightmare and part millennial hallucination, filled with detail, drama and a richly varied cast of characters. In his quest to plumb both the grimy depths and radiant heights of the continent that is Bombay, Suketu Mehta has taken travel writing to an entirely new level. This is a gripping, compellingly readable account of a love affair with a city: I couldn’t put it down’—Amitav Ghosh



‘Bombay gets its Boswell, his chronicle as sprawling and enchanting as his subject’—India Today



‘A seething, rumbling, deeply compassionate break-dance of a book’—Hindu
‘Narrative reporting at its finest, probably the best work of nonfiction to come out of India in recent years . . . Mehta succeeds so brilliantly in taking the pulse of this riotous urban jungle’—New York Times Book Review



‘Mehta’s tales, pounding along in the present tense, read like a modern Arabian Nights, only crueller, more poignant, more real. . .Part memoir, part journalism, part travelogue, Maximum City is a tour de force’—The Times



‘The mother of all Mumbai books . . . stunningly written’—Time Out Mumbai