A Bad Character

Our narrator is “twenty and untouched” when her mother dies. Sent by her absentee father to live with a relative in a modest New Delhi apartment, she is ill-equipped to resist the allure of the rich and rebellious young man who approaches her one day at a cafe. He is a few years older, and from a different social class, but they both yearn to break free of tradition. As they drive around Delhi—eating, making love, falling apart—he introduces her to an India that she never knew existed, and will never be able to forget. 
 
Told in a voice at once gritty and lyrical, A Bad Character is an astounding book, an intimate and raw exploration of female transformation in contemporary India, and an unforgettable hymn to a dangerous, exhilarating city.

“Searing, intoxicating . . . . The story of a young woman’s hunger to be free.” —The New York Times Book Review 

“A fiery, incandescent debut [that] artfully captures the perilous desires of a woman alone in New Delhi. Kapoor’s novel smolders with submerged rage, pain, abandonment and erotic desire. . . . Promises great things to come.” —The Huffington Post
 
“A dark, hypnotic story.” —Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life  

“[Kapoor] writes with a keening, furious sorrow that rang in my ears well after I finished the book.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Captivating . . . A Bad Character echoes Nabokov’s Lolita with a story about the sexual initiation of a young woman, but offers a female perspective, one that doesn’t pull any punches. . . . Literary voices like Kapoor’s . . . are now more crucial than ever.” —The Rumpus

“Spellbinding: Here is a novel about sex, about drugs, about a city on the brink of awe-inspiring and terrible change.” —Nell Freudenberger, author of The Newlyweds

“India, once again. Its dark underbelly—flashing images of poverty and squalor, corruption and drugs and, above all, battered lives . . . Here’s a young woman, named Deepti Kapoor, picking up where the others have left off, adding something here (a female protagonist), subtracting something there (sentiment), splashing into our lives like the beginning of the monsoon hitting Delhi’s streets. And the irony of it all? By the last page you have to ask yourself who is the bad character of her title: the unnamed female narrator, or the man whose life she believes she has unpacked so carefully.” —Counterpunch

“A stylishly written, powerfully moving love story. . . . What Twilight in Delhi is to the 20th century Indian novel, A Bad Character is to the 21st: the essence of India’s corrupt capital, brilliantly and darkly distilled. This is a remarkable debut from a major new talent.” —William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal

“An intimate, raw exploration of [a] profound transformation.” —Booklist

“Haunting . . . . A beguiling, hallucinatory experience, at once unsettling and intimate. . . . A Bad Character is an astounding book: read it with the scent of diesel in your nostrils and red dust in your mouth.” —The New Indian Express

“A poignant and impressionistic portrait of the end of adolescence and a changing world.” —The Telegraph (London) 

“Impressive in its . . . evocation of a dazzling, dangerous cityscape.” —Kirkus Reviews