The Hope Factory

With humor, intelligence, and masterly prose, Lavanya Sankaran's debut novel brilliantly captures the vitality and danger of a newly industrialized city and how it shapes the dreams and aspirations of two very different families. Anand is a Bangalore success story: successful, well married, rich. At least, that's how he appears. But if his little factory is to grow, he needs land and money, and, in the New India, neither of these is easy to find. Kamala, Anand's family's maid, lives perilously close to the edge of disaster. She and her clever teenage son have almost nothing, and their small hopes for self-betterment depend on the contentment of Anand's wife: a woman to whom whims come easily. But Kamala's son keeps bad company, and Anand's marriage is in trouble. The murky world where crime and land and politics meet is a dangerous place for a good man, particularly one on whom the well-being of so many depends. Rich with irony and...