Solo is ... utterly unforgettable in its humanity.
- Kapka Kassabova, The Guardian (full review).

What a delight to find a novelist unfazed by the 21st century ... This is an important work. Already it's my tip for the Man Booker this year.
- Nigel Krauth, The Australian (read the full review).

Solo is a nuanced and virtuoso performance.
- Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday (full review).

Solo is beautifully symphonic - elegiac and prophetic, underpinned by intelligence, compassion and a wonderfully unfettered imagination. It’s a necessary as well as a timely novel.
- Joanne Hayden, Sunday Business Post (full review).

... a surreal history of massive proportions ... Dasgupta's writing is a revelation ... The back cover lauds the book as "a devastating and rapturous novel". It is. I'm still shaking.
- Matt Bowler, The Nelson Mail (full review).


In the hour before they retired, the silence claimed his mother too, and Ulrich relaxed into contentment. While the ball of wool twitched with her knitting, his attention drifted from his books and spiralled into his own recesses, where old faces coasted past like comforting submarine monsters, and fine filaments lit up a route to the future. He came to find solace in these daydreams, and on the days when he did not have an opportunity to cultivate them, he went to bed quite unsatisfied.

"Solo" recounts the life and daydreams of Ulrich, a one hundred year-old blind man from Bulgaria.

On hot days, the smells become overpowering, and rain comes as a relief, washing everything away. The blind man sits by the window when the rain is heavy and he can hear the different patters of near and far: the silky spray in the trees, the heavy drumming on plastic water tanks, the hard scatter of roads and pavements, the different metallic pitches of car roofs and drain covers, the baritone trilling of tarpaulin, the sticky overflow of mud, the concentrated gushing of drainpipes – and, for a moment, the landscape springs forth, and he is reminded how it is to see.

Solo is published by HarperCollins in the British Commonwealth. It will be published in 2010 in France (Gallimard), Germany (Karl Blessing), Norway (Aschehoug ), Italy (Feltrinelli), the Netherlands ((Signatuuur) and Bulgaria (Janet 45). For dates in other countries, watch this space, or join the Solo Facebook group for news.
.
Wherever you are in the world, you can order Solo from Amazon.co.uk.

Rana Dasgupta will present Solo at a number of festivals in 2009:

January: the Jaipur Literature Festival
February: the Perth Writers' Festival
March: the Bath Literature Festival and the Man Hong Kong International Literature Festival
July: the Port Eliot Festival
August: the Edinburgh International Book Festival


Solo follows Rana Dasgupta's first book, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a collection of thirteen folktales for the age of globalisation.

Only the most gifted writers, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jonathan Safron-Foer, can hold the surreal and the real in satisfying equilibrium. This elite now welcomes Rana Dasgupta to its ranks. He makes magic realism his own, and his debut novel is superb.
- Andrew Staffell, Time Out (London)





Tokyo Cancelled was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (UK) and the Hutch Crossword Book Award (India). One tale from the book was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Prize.

These stories ... ah, they outdo the Arabian Nights for inventiveness ... One closes the book with head spinning.
- Rachel Hore, The Guardian