Sacred Games

From the acclaimed author of 'Red Earth and Pouring Rain', this is a collection of interconnected stories set in contemporary India. The stories are linked by a single narrator, an elusive civil servant who recounts the stories in a smoky Bombay bar.

Vikram Chandra's is an unforgettable reading experience, a contemporary — with an eighteenth-century warrior-poet (now reincarnated as a typewriting monkey) and an Indian student home from college in America switching off as our Scheherazades. Ranging from bloody battles in colonial India to college anomie in California, from Hindu gods to MTV, Chandra's novel is engrossing, enthralling, impossible to put down — a remarkable meditation on quests and homecomings, good and evil, storytelling and redemption.

The nonfiction debut from the author of the international bestseller about the surprising overlap between writing and computer coding.

Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?

Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an “Indian Mafia” in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer’s art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.