The Book Review x

October 2020
A People's History of Heaven

When I began reading this novel, I realized the novel gave access to its readers into the lives of those living in the slums of Bangalore. Two books that I had read years before, came to my mind: Shantaram, a 2003 novel by Gregory David Roberts that depicted the slums of Bombay and City of Joy, a 1985 novel by Dominique Lapierre that described the slums of Calcutta. But in both the cases, it looked inside the slums from an outsider's point of view. There was a constant exchange between those who arrived from the outside and settled down in these areas with those who were already living there. It required an entity from the outside world to draw the readers' attention to this part of the world. A People's History of Heaven does nothing of this kind.

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