Flying Solo

Rana Dasgupta has been named among the regional winners of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2010 in the Best Book category for Europe and South Asia for his novel Solo, woven around the life of a 100-year-old Bulgarian.

Solo is 1971-born Dasgupta's second novel after Tokyo Cancelled (2005), which looked at how globalisation is impacting everyday lives across the world.

In Solo (2009) writes  "an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man. Having achieved little in his twentieth-century life, he settles into a long and prophetic daydream of the twenty-first century, where all the ideological experiments of the old century are over, and a collection of startling characters - demons and angels - live a life beyond utopia." (Wikipedia).

The contenders for Best Book included two other novels by Indian authors — For Pepper and Christ: A Novel by Keki Daruwalla and Amit Chaudhuri's The Immortals.

Dasgupta, who describes himself as ‘a British writer living in Delhi’, was born and bred in Canterbury, and his first novel was referred to as a modern version of Canterbury Tales.
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Interview with the author:
The Canterbury tale-teller Sunday Times 

Author's website
http://www.ranadasgupta.com