Neel Mukherjee

She is a book historian by profession but I know her as a novelist. Rimi B. Chatterjee is a magician-juggler of genres: her first novel, Signal Red, was a bleak thriller about bioterrorism (prescient, that), the first of its kind in India; her second novel, City of Love, set in sixteenth-century India, brings to mind Umberto Eco and I. Allan Sealy, and is a crisscrossing narrative of several journeys. It is a thickly-peopled book, but also teeming with ideas, history, details, riffs, a veritable cornucopia of knowledge and stories. It is a hoary old cliché to say that fiction makes us enter a different world but in the case of City of Love it is both accurate and true. And what worlds those are: of a Castilian trader, of a Moorish pirate, of a Shaiva-Tantric devotee, of a simple tribal girl. As their worlds and trajectories collide, an unforgettable story takes shape. Her next novel, Flip!, promises to be a space opera set in the far future. Her blogspot is called ‘Live Like a Flame’. Follow her, she’s taking Indian writing in English on a great adventure.