Serious Men

Manu Joseph

Aug 2010 · HarperCollins Canada

About this ebook

Ayyan Mani works in the Institute of Theory and Research as a personal assistant to a brilliant, insufferable astronomer, Arvind Acharya, who is obsessed with his theory about microscopic aliens falling to earth. Mani is one of the thousands of men stranded in the slums of Mumbai, but ever the opportunist, Mani is also an astute observer and sly eavesdropper, and he makes sure he knows everything that is going on in the Institute, listening in on private conversations, and opening, reading and resealing confidential couriered letters.

Partly to entertain himself, partly to cheer up his once-animated but now work-worn wife, partly to bolster his ten-year-old son’s confidence, Mani weaves an outrageous fiction around the boy—a fiction that captures the interest of his superiors at the Institute and threatens to set into motion an unstoppable and disastrous chain of events. And Mani, struggling to keep his own dreams alive, sees opportunity in everything.

About the author

MANU JOSEPH is the editor of the Indian news magazine OPEN and a columnist with the International Herald Tribune. His first novel, Serious Men, won the PEN Open Book Award and The Hindu Best Fiction Award 2010. It was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, and was picked by The Independent, The Huffington Post, and the California