Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558616080
Publication Date: 07-01-2010

Marriages, affairs, suicides, duplicitous relations, second chances, murder, madness, and true love—Rajmahal is a beautifully crafted tale of families brought together in an unusual Bengali house over a century of turbulent changes. Within the walls of this stately home, the melting pot of tenants, alive and dead, struggle to come to grips with the social, economic, and intellectual forces working in India as it moves from the British Raj to independence. Their intertwined fortunes and personal battles become a mirror of the struggle for possession of the country's future.

"Written in an evocative and thought-provoking style, [Sengupta] compels the reader to turn the pages in a self-discovery of human emotions and depths [that] transcend the barriers of time and space, making it an interesting and stimulating read." —The Pioneer Sunday

"A mine of engagingly embroidered stories that leave us replete and delighted." —The Sunday Tribune (India)

"[Rajmahal] is witty, vivid, evocative and informed. . . . The writing is sharp and compelling. Finally, it is the quality of the author's intelligence—of mind and heart—that determines the value of a novel. . . .Sengupta's book is. . . distinct from the recent body of competant Indian fiction in English. . . . Just read it. There is something in it for everybody. And many will love it all." —The Book Review (India)

 "The encompassing achievement of the novel is its penetration of a new stage in our human history: Sengupta's is among the first and unquestionably to me the most revealing description of the life of the post-colonialist and post-colonized living on, somehow together. The colonizers who have lost the sense of what home they came from, and the colonized finding they have become inexorably something like the people from whom they struggled so long to gain their freedom." —Nadine Gordimer, author of July's People