Rana Dasgupta

Harvard Book Store is delighted to welcome British-Indian novelist RANA DASGUPTA for a reading from his newest exploration of globalization, the novel Solo.

In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father’s fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams—and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich’s fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.

“Solo is mannered in its strangeness, but utterly unforgettable in its humanity. It hums the inner and outer melodies of a life lived solo, until it becomes a discordant symphony of the human condition. This lifts it from a freak show to the kind of 'philharmonic' novel that reminds us why we will always need to tell the extraordinary stories of people's ordinary lives.” —The Guardian (UK)

“This gloriously eccentric adventure through a century of Bulgarian history is so much fun to read you'll hardly realise how much you're learning.” —The Daily Mail (UK)