Fury

From one of the world's truly great writers, Fury is a wickedly brilliant and pitch-black comedy about a middle-aged professor who finds himself in New York City in the summer of 2000. Not since the Bombay of Midnight's Children have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel. Fury opens on a New York living at breakneck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik Solanka,, a Cambridge-educated self-made millionaire originally from Bombay, arrives looking, perversely, for escape.

This former philosophy professor is the inventor of the hugely popular doll, Little Brain, whose multiform ubiquity - as puppet, cartoon and masked woman - now rankles with him. He becomes frustratingly estranged from his own creation. At the same time, his marriage is disintegrating: it escalates into a rage-filled battle, and Solanka very nearly commits an unforgivable act. Horrified by the fury within him, he flees home and family and becomes a sort of spiritual mendicant - except that he has a credit card and a duplex on the Upper West Side. Solanka discovers that he has come to a city Roiling with anger, where cab drivers spout invective and a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete, a metropolis whose population is united by petty spats and bone-deep resentments. His own thoughts, emotions and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. Solanka's navigation of his new world makes for a hugely entertaining and compulsively readable novel.

Fury is a pitiless comedy that lays bare the darkest side of human nature with spectacular insight and much glee.