Ian McDonald just emailed me to point out this review of River of Gods
couldn’t be happier. Ian’s been hailed so much already we’re almost jaded, but this one comes from The Hindu – India’s National Newspaper Online! In this article, “India in the Future,” Pradeep Sebastian begins by admitting that he passed up RoG on numerous occasions, assuming it was “one more lightweight take on India by a foreigner.”
But when he did pick it up, he quickly concluded that RoG was much more:
“Foreign writers have successfully used India as a backdrop for mysteries and thrillers: Barbara Cleverly’s period mysteries (The Palace Tiger), Paul Mann’s thrillers (The Ganja Coast) and one-off thrillers such as Leslie Forbes’ Bombay Ice and Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram. River of Gods surpasses all of them easily to become not just the definitive thriller set in India but the most richly imaginative thriller about India.”
Sebastian concludes that RoG is “a compellingly realised future India.” As the Times of India previously said, “Not bad for a firang who has oodles of imagination and chutzpah.”
(And I was just kidding about being jaded – keep those good reviews coming!)