Fairy Tales at Fifty

Upamanyu Chatterjee

Nov 2014 · Sold by Harper Collins

About this ebook

Nirip on the cusp of fifty is not happy with his life. His father is an ogre and his mother a witch. He is not happy with that either. His sort of half-sister is a sort of half-man. A really close relative turns out to be a serial killer. He is not happy sleeping with his chauffeur's wife. Neither is she. Then, for his amusement, his father arranges a cricket match between rival dacoit teams in which some of the players are shot dead. Who could be happy in such circumstances? Days before his fiftieth birthday, with Nirip still wondering whether he should go ahead and have himself kidnapped so that he can make some money, he discovers, most unexpectedly, that he is not the biological child of his parents. Witty, macabre, sad, cruel, unforgivingly insightful, Fairy Tales at Fifty is part adventure tale, part nightmare, part acid trip---and throughout a triumph of fiction.

About the author

Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in 1959. He joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1983. His published works include short stories and the novels English, August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award for writing in English, Weight Loss (2006) and Way to Go (2011), which was shortlisted for the Hindu Best Fiction Award. In 2008, he was awarded the Order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for his contribution to literature.