book review for age of vice

‘Age of Vice’: A Lush Thriller Dives Into New Delhi’s Underworld

In Deepti Kapoor’s cinematic novel, a young man from the provinces falls in with a powerful crime syndicate.

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By Dwight Garner

• Published Jan. 5, 2023 Updated Jan. 17, 2023

AGE OF VICE, by Deepti Kapoor

Deepti Kapoor’s second novel, “Age of Vice,” is a luxe thriller, set in New Delhi, that rides the line between commercial and literary fiction so adroitly that it will almost certainly move a lot of units, as I’ve heard publishers say about their best sellers.

The book has echoes of Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather,” in terms of its mobbed-up apex predators, and Vikas Swarup’s “Q & A,” the 2005 novel that was the basis for Danny Boyle’s film “Slumdog Millionaire.” There’s no quiz show in “Age of Vice,” but there is a poor boy who slides through a backdoor into a demimonde of degraded sophisticates. He sees things that make him want to unscrew his eyeballs, clean them and screw them back in.

“Age of Vice” is the “ Good Morning America ” book-club selection for January, and it’s been purchased by FX for a series. It’s easy to see why attention has been paid. As a storyteller, Kapoor is a natural. Her novel offers the pleasures of narrative dexterity. It moves — early on, at any rate — as if on rails.

She does not offer, except rarely, the pleasures of subtlety. Over more than 500 pages, the book’s sleekness bends toward slickness and the magic toward tricks. Its length really hurts it. What might have been a crisp and moody entertainment, in Graham Greene’s elevated sense of that word, distends.

Kapoor, who grew up in northern India and has worked as a journalist in New Delhi, also does not offer, except rarely again, the pleasures of interiority. The hot bodies (everyone is gorgeous), the status details, the ambushes, the crunching fight scenes that make the characters resemble video-game avatars, the “shattering” revelations — it all piles up.

The characters (conflicted journalist, wealthy man’s dilettante son, wide-eyed boy from the sticks) are familiar. The politics are not delicate. A Mercedes rams into five poor people, including a pregnant woman, on the first page.

On Audible, the book might really lift the burden of a cross-country car trip. But it doesn’t make you a snob to want more from a novel than you would get from a good evening of Netflix. I kept reading, sometimes admiringly, but mentally I checked out around page 75.

“Age of Vice” is about Ajay, who grew up in desperate circumstances in Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India. His parents were scavengers who scraped feces from dry latrines. His father was killed, and his sister apparently dragged into prostitution, after an accident involving a goat.

Ajay is taken away and, to service a debt, sold as a servant. He ends up with decent people, who treat him well and educate him. He later becomes, improbably enough, personal assistant and bodyguard to Sunny Wadia, the half-enlightened playboy scion of a well-known crime family.

Sunny has artistic and moral aspirations. He and his posse, civilized monsters, live large and live well. Ajay first sees them out of the big city.

They swallow up the places they go, they invade them, colonize them, move on. Money does that. They want the walnut cake here. They want the banana crepes there. They like this stroganoff. They order dishes from one café to be delivered while they sit in the next. They sit in Purple Haze and order dishes from MoonBeam.

It becomes Ajay’s job to clean up after Sunny’s wild nights and to fetch him his “warm lemon water with grated turmeric,” his fresh croissants and his newspapers, and run his bath on the mornings after. It’s also Ajay’s job to protect Sunny. He learns to fight, and before long he’s a John Wick-like superstud. He nonchalantly snaps bones, cracks skulls and slits throats.

The third primary character is Neda, a journalist whose newspaper is working on a story implicating Sunny’s family in a host of crimes, not least of which is a plan to clear slums and further impoverish their residents. Yet Neda is attracted to Sunny and his life, and they commence an affair.

Kapoor has a cinematic eye. This novel has a lot of moments that feel lush and screenplay-ready: motorcycle rides on roads that cut through paddy fields, seen as if from a drone; pensive drags on cigarettes; looming goons; flights on private jets; VIP rooms; “Silkwood”-style showers to scrub off bad decisions; gangs of nearly naked men covered in grease who emerge from the roadside, as if from a Cormac McCarthy fever dream, to wreak havoc.

She can be a perceptive writer, one who has plenty to say about modern Delhi and the conditions that spawned and that sustain the Wadia crime syndicate. You sense in Ajay’s fractured Horatio Alger bottom-dog story links to novels like Aravind Adiga’s “ The White Tiger ” and Mohsin Hamid’s “ How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia .”

But as “Age of Vice” rolls on, the exigencies of plot trample whatever flowers, in the form of complexities, attempt to bloom. The prose heats and begins to tumble down the page like poetry, and it is hardly good poetry:

Now everything is a lie. His life is a lie. The pain of this is unbearable.

But he is obliterating himself. Turning himself inside out. Turning himself away.

“Age of Vice” is the first novel in a planned trilogy. People say the two saddest words in the English language are “What party?” But “planned trilogy” cannot be far behind.

Kapoor has so many gifts that it feels churlish to want more from her than this sprawling pop novel. She’s aimed at a target, and she’s crushed that target.

Better her on the best-seller list than most of what’s there. All hail the new Puzo! When the FX series commences, I’ll bring the popcorn.

AGE OF VICE | By Deepti Kapoor | 548 pp. | Riverhead Books | $30

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008. His most recent book is “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany.” More about Dwight Garner

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Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor review – India’s answer to The Godfather

This ambitious crime thriller is an epic story of political and moral corruption

T he inciting incident of Age of Vice, a horrific collision between dissolute wealth and harsh poverty, marks out the central theme from the very start. It’s 2004 in New Delhi and a speeding Mercedes with a drunk driver at the wheel ploughs into a group of street sleepers, killing five. This symbolic yet seemingly senseless act also binds together the three main protagonists of an impressively ambitious literary thriller: Sunny Wadia, the playboy scion of a major criminal family; Neda Kapur, an investigative journalist; and Ajay, a hapless footsoldier in the Wadias’ nefarious business empire. Their lives interweave in an epic story of political and moral corruption in contemporary India . With intricate yet plausible plotting, the book has all the energy of a high-concept crime thriller. What makes it compelling is the emotional intelligence of Kapoor’s characterisations.

We start with Ajay, born into squalor and privation in Uttar Pradesh. A lower-caste boy, he is “less than poor”. Sold into slavery at the age of eight and serving in a backpacker cafe by his teens, he slowly works his way up to become a “Wadia man”, as Sunny’s valet and bodyguard. Ajay’s picaresque struggle provides some kind of moral compass to our tale, and a ground zero from which to view the vicious hierarchies we encounter on the way. He seems to rise up, yet every material gain brings a spiritual loss of self. When he tries to do the right thing, he is simply used as a fall guy, but pushed too far, he is eventually driven by a heartbreaking quest for revenge and redemption.

It is through Ajay that we get to know Sunny. Spoilt but clever and charismatic, his superficial bluster masks a deeply conflicted soul. The philanthropic projects he uses to front the Wadias’ criminal activities betray a yearning idealism and desire for rebellion against his twisted family values. He starts to think of a riverside development as a real opportunity to transform Delhi for the better, until it is revealed as a gruesome property fraud. This, and his ill-fated relationship with Neda, provoke a lethal conflict with his father. In a morally inverted world, Sunny is propelled on a downward trajectory, finding himself dragged back into his grim familial destiny and feeling “the desire to corrupt grow within him”.

Neda “grew up in the world of cultural elites” with radical parents, and Sunny “represented that vulgar new India her mother railed against. He fit into that line and transcended it.” With a dangerous mix of cynicism and naivety, she is drawn in by his disruptive glamour and only realises she is out of her depth when it’s too late. “I didn’t even know there was such a thing as ethics in journalism,” she admits in an unsent confessional email to her former editor. “I knew injustice when I saw it, in a novel, on the news, but I never understood the process of its creation.”

“This is Kali Yuga,” she declares in the same email, “the losing age, the age of vice.” This Hindu cyclic era of decadence, also referenced in the Mahabharata , gives a classical context for the deadly struggle Neda finds herself caught up in. She feels helpless yet guilty at her own inaction, at one point defining herself as a “recovering coward”. Ill-fated love and toxic family power struggles provide emotional drive for this big dynastic saga of organised crime that could be India’s answer to The Godfather . The epigram Mario Puzo borrowed from Balzac is equally apt here: “Behind every great fortune is a crime.” Now seems a good time to examine the underbelly of India’s capitalist system from the inside, and Kapoor clearly knows her subject well. The feel of authenticity she brings to this fictional world gives it real political and moral weight.

And though there is plenty of action and much violence in this novel, the real suspense is found in the power dynamics that motivate the brutality, putting its players in constant jeopardy. Kapoor writes with a spare, hard-boiled style, fuelling the pace of her narrative but allowing for starkly lyrical touches as well. (At a roadhouse during Ajay’s childhood transit, “a mindless tube light gathers yearning moths”.) Her analysis is often razor-sharp, defining a “globalised world given over to solitary consumption”. She takes time with her characters, but there’s a brightness to her prose that lets us connect directly to these very alienated protagonists. Not so much a slow burn as a constantly sparking fuse.

Everything builds to a set-piece climax at an opulent wedding where “the guest list is a who’s who of modern India” and a killer from the guttersnipe Chaddi Baniyan gang is on the loose. Once more low life and high society collide in an explosive denouement, and the ending hints that there is more to come. Age of Vice certainly does not disappoint as a commercial crime thriller, and is already in development as a TV series. But it deserves literary plaudits as well, for its depth and relevance, and for proving once more that the novel remains the supreme medium of long-form narrative drama for us to binge upon.

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Deepti Kapoor’s thriller ‘Age of Vice’ starts 2023 with a bang

The explosive novel tears through a story of corruption in modern-day india.

F orget the fireworks in New York, London and Dubai. The most dazzling explosions to herald 2023 come from Deepti Kapoor’s novel “ Age of Vice .”

Swinging from the hovels to the palaces of contemporary India, this hypnotic story poses a horrible dilemma: For days, I was torn between gorging on “Age of Vice” or rationing out the chapters to make them last. Finally free from the book’s grip, now all I want to do is get others hooked.

Kapoor was born in northern India and worked for several years as a journalist in Delhi, an experience that clearly informs this lush thriller. More than two years ago, having spotted Kapoor’s ferocious plot, arresting characters and electric dialogue, FX locked down “Age of Vice” for a series; rights to the novel have already been sold in 20 countries.

This is a rare case of a book bounding as high as its hype.

On the first page, a Mercedes speeding through Delhi careens off the street and slaughters five people, including a pregnant woman who had just arrived in the city. That deadly accident ricochets through one of India’s most powerful crime families — and from there the intrigue never pauses to take a breath.

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When authorities arrive on the grisly scene of the crash, they find a 22-year-old chauffeur named Ajay sitting at the wheel, reeking of whisky. Under torture, “the Mercedes Killer” reveals little about himself before being consigned to prison. And even when three goons set upon him with razor blades, Ajay stays quiet and accepts the cuts as penance.

But “his patience finally snaps, breaks like a trapdoor,” Kapoor writes. In a flash, Ajay shatters his attackers and then just stands there in the prison hallway slick with blood.

This is no ordinary chauffeur.

From that blistering start, Kapoor moves back and forth through time and up and down the social ladder. It’s a complicated but never confusing structure that unravels some mysteries while spinning new ones. Good as she is at ripping up the pages with acts of violence, she’s even more sly about pulling us into these characters’ lives.

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Nothing about Ajay’s past suggests he would end up working for one of India’s most feared families. As a poor 8-year-old boy in eastern Uttar Pradesh, he was destined to a miserable life of subsistence farming — or worse. To settle a debt after his father is beaten to death, Ajay’s mother sells the boy off. But somehow Ajay cheats death, eventually catching the eye of a spoiled young man named Sunny Wadia.

So begins an extraordinary journey and a deeply unnerving relationship.

Ajay discovers that he loves to serve, to please, a desire that Kapoor captures in sentences that spring with frantic enthusiasm. Ajay latches on to young Sunny with the desperation of a groupie and the discipline of an acolyte. As Sunny’s armed bodyguard, he’s trained to kill every threat. As Sunny’s uniformed valet, he’s taught to mix every drink. “He has become a name,” Kapoor writes. “To be called and used. Turned on like a tap.” He sleeps lightly and always with a phone next to his ear in case Sunny calls. He lurks on the edge of every orgy, he follows every drunken race, he tidies up after cocaine-fueled revelry. And in return for his unbounded devotion and discretion, he’s allowed to gaze upon a realm of unimaginable riches and pleasures. “Ajay is the beating heart of Sunny’s world. Wordless, faceless, content.”

Kapoor stokes the flame of F. Scott Fitzgerald to create this Indian Gatsby, “this mysterious young god of Delhi.” At Sunny’s lavish parties, celebrities, politicians, models and hangers-on gossip about his past, his money, his business. “Maybe he wasn’t even real,” one guest thinks. In a candid moment, Sunny acknowledges, “I’ve had to construct myself,” and the viability of his constructed persona becomes the central problem of “Age of Vice.”

Kapoor situates her story in the broiling nexus of India’s economic and political development. It’s a world of yawning gaps between a small upper class that lives in platinum luxury and a huge lower class growing vegetables in their own waste. As part of a new generation of enlightened capitalists, Sunny is driven by dreams of transforming Delhi into what he calls “a truly global city.” But his program of expansion and gentrification involves massive displacement of farmers and poor residents, and Kapoor cleverly captures the way public opinion is bent toward the neoliberal view. “The newspapers heralded the transformation of the urban space,” she writes. “The poor were no longer victims of an incompetent and corrupt state. They were encroachers and thieves. Their misery was not the misery of lives. As human beings they were being erased.”

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Even with a pliant populace, though, how far can Sunny get without the help of his gangster father and uncle, whose tentacles extend into every corporate and government office, strangling even the best-laid plans? Torn between his dreamy ideals and his voracious appetites, Sunny gets pickled in cynicism, while his loyal servant Ajay must contend with the results. It’s an ordeal of dissipation that Kapoor captures with an alluring mix of disgust and sympathy.

Observing the family’s corrosive influence play out across the country, one discouraged journalist tells her editor: “Nothing will change. This is Kali Yuga, the losing age, the age of vice.”

Central to Kapoor’s success is her agile style. In long, winding backstories, her voice grows rich and evocative. But she is the master of broken sentences. Phrases sparking as fast as synapses. And short paragraphs that the eye rushes past like a falling body spotting windows on the way down. In moments of murderous crisis, she writes in the present tense with such shocking immediacy you’ll wince and duck.

Even at 548 pages spread over many years, “Age of Vice” is too well choreographed to be called sprawling. No, this is pure cunning. Ordinarily, if a novelist introduced a new narrator on Page 442 with a 34-page detour, I’d be rolling my eyes in exasperation. Here, it feels like some forbidden elixir to be hoarded.

A few years ago in the journal Granta, Kapoor wrote, “In India, all life seems present and possible, usually all at once,” and now she’s created a novel with arms long enough to hold and squeeze that multiverse. “So many people travel to India for the ‘trip of a lifetime,’ returning broken or illuminated or intoxicated or enlightened, and, despite the perceived hardships they may have faced, almost immediately yearn to go back.”

Sign me up. Kapoor is already working on the second volume of a projected trilogy. I have only one word of advice: Hurry .

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

Age of Vice

By Deepti Kapoor. Riverhead. 548 pp. $30

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AGE OF VICE

by Deepti Kapoor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2023

A bit too long-winded but a whole lot of fun.

A poor boy joins up with a ruthless rich family in this fast-paced thriller.

Kapoor’s sprawling second novel opens with a horrific scene: five day laborers lying dead on a New Delhi street, killed after being struck by a Mercedes early in the morning. When the police arrive, they find Ajay, a young man, at the wheel, an empty bottle of scotch nearby. Ajay, we learn, comes from a “poor, less than poor” family in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh; his family are members of a socially disadvantaged caste. When he was a boy, his father was beaten to death by a group of strongmen; his mother sold him to pay for the money she borrowed for her husband’s medical bills. Ajay worked for the farmer who bought him until the man died, then found work in a backpacker cafe where he met Sunny Wadia, the de facto leader of a band of “young, rich, and glamorous Indians, not afraid to show it, not afraid to slum it, welcome everywhere, welcomed by themselves.” Sunny, a flashy playboy, offers Ajay a job working for him in Delhi; the young man accepts, becoming a valet, butler, bodyguard: “the beating heart of Sunny’s world. Wordless, faceless, content.” Ajay soon learns that the Wadia family, entrenched in a feud, is more sinister and dangerous than he thought and that he’s being made to take the fall for a crime he didn’t commit. Kapoor switches points of view and timelines throughout the book to great effect; it doesn’t take long for the reader to become invested in the Mario Puzo–esque drama of the Wadia family and their associates. Her dialogue shines, and although the novel is a bit too long, it’s certainly gripping. Fans of crime novels will find much to admire in this quite entertaining book.

Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-593-32879-8

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | THRILLER | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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Love, Death and Karma in the “Age of Vice”

In 2002, a Toyota Landcruiser belonging to Bollywood superstar Salman Khan allegedly crashed into a bakery in Bandra, a trendy suburb in Western Mumbai, running over five unhoused men asleep on the pavement right outside. The trial dominated headlines and sparked dinner table debates for months, until Khan’s driver testified that he was the one behind the wheel, and the lower court’s conviction was eventually overturned . The case, however, has clearly inspired a number of South Asian crime writers: just such an incident is the inciting event of Arvind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger , and also serves as a capture spiral in Deepti Kapoor’s sprawling sophomore novel, Age of Vice . 

Age of Vice is the ambitious first installment in a trilogy that weaves the sweeping pathos and entangled fealties of a mafia family saga with performative violence and operatic debauchery, set in a landscape that evokes the stark, earthy cinematic style of recent crime drama hits like Gangs of Wasseypur and Sacred Games .The novel begins with zero throat-clearing, in media res: five pavement dwellers lie dead on the side of Delhi’s inner ring road on a frozen February morning in 2004. Not far from the carnage is the speeding Mercedes that mowed them down. The vehicle is registered to a hotelier and aristocrat, but behind the wheel is a man named Ajay, a chauffeur, a man Friday, a nobody. Later on in the chapter, it comes to light that Ajay works for a shadowy figure, the head of a vast crime syndicate. The police’s attitude towards Ajay switches from brutal to fearfully solicitous the moment they uncover this fact, as is evidenced from Ajay’s exchange with the warden in his office at Tihar Jail, where Ajay is held as an undertrial:

The warden asks him to sit. “Have a cigarette. Help yourself. There’s been a mistake. I wasn’t told,” he says. “If I’d been told. This would never have happened.” […] “You should have said something. You should have made it clear. You should have let us know. Why didn’t you let us know?”

Ajay stares at the food, at the cigarette pack.

“Know what?”

The warden smiles.

“That you’re a Wadia man.”

Through a journalist’s quashed exposé, we learn that Bunty Wadia has tentacles in liquor, land grabs, transport, politics, the police, etc.; there is no institution in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh he has left untouched, uncorrupted. Bunty Wadia’s lust for power is naked and covert at the same time: he stays out of the headlines, steers clear of public events, and works through proxies. His only weakness is a yearning for dynasty, embodied by his son, Sunny Wadia, a dissolute twenty-something financier and flaneur who (at least at first) wants to get as far away from his father’s murderous legacy as he possibly can. 

“I love beauty. I want to create beautiful things. But that’s the last thing they understand. They want me to have a beautiful surface and be rotten to the core, like they are.” Sunny renders his world and his family in these words to Neda Kapur, a journalist who is drawn to him for all the terrible reasons people are drawn to chimerical, powerful men. Kapoor paints Sunny as the quintessential anti-hero: part soul-destroying and part mesmerizing. In a sort of Fifty Shades of Grey type interlude, Neda is swept up in secret trysts all over the city, in luxurious hotel rooms and elaborate dinners behind lacquered private screens. “She came to understand,” Kapoor writes about Neda, “going for a meal with Sunny was not about the food. […] It was the performance, it was waiting to see what would happen next […] in this world they had conjured.” 

In turn, Sunny is in awe of something in Neda, something that all his money and connections cannot buy: a pedigree. With her home in tony Malcha Marg, her scholarly parents from “highly educated families risen to prominence in colonial days,” Neda’s cash-poor, prestige-rich inheritance comprises a shibboleth—the vocabulary of class—that nouveau-riche families like Sunny’s take many successful generations to acquire. Sunny marvels at the fact that Neda can pull up to a five-star hotel in her beat up old Maruti and swan inside knowing that she doesn’t need any outward markers of privilege. “I’m nothing without my suit,” Sunny tells Neda, “without my car, without my watch. Without these props, I barely exist.”

Chicago Author Cyn Vargas on the Novella, Residencies, and Finding What’s Not Said

Viewed through Neda’s eyes, Kapoor manages to widen the novel’s scope from being just an entertaining thriller to a work with something important to say about modern India, a country in flux, where the anxieties of class-passing often dominate conversations about the new post-colonial paradigm. Sunny Wadia believes he has an essential role to play in the struggle between the entrenched and aspirational classes. “We romanticize poverty too much,” he asserts, “India doesn’t need to be this way.” The aria of Sunny’s grandiose plans to turn Delhi—Delhi, with all its old-world idiosyncrasies and byzantine social mores, its pockets of beauty amidst the ugly Darwinian hustle and transactional opportunism—into a modern, global city in the style of Singapore or Dubai, with shopping malls, cafés, promenades, skyscrapers, etc.—is quickly drowned out by the discordant reality of having to displace thousands of laborers, domestic workers and hawkers. These are people at the margins eking out a living by working for the white collar, relatively moneyed, upper middle-class. A brutal incident during the bulldozing of one such unauthorized colony invites too-close journalistic scrutiny into the Wadia family’s dealings, and things swiftly begin to fall apart for the main characters. Sunny is left with an impossible set of choices: either he leaves his father behind to pursue his own dreams with Neda or he gives in to the vertigo of his father’s unchecked power, of his unassailable, unstoppable wealth and influence. On the night of the Mercedes’s accident, Sunny makes his choice, succumbing to the cruelty and chaos of his father’s world the way an addict succumbs to a high. 

When the narrative camera pans to Ajay, the driver found unconscious at the Mercedes’s steering wheel, it focuses on his gestalt from an idealistic rural youth to a cold city killer. We watch Ajay transform, first in the employ of Sunny Wadia, later in the bowels of Tihar Jail. Ajay, sold by his destitute mother as a child. Ajay, gaping in awe and reverence at the fantastical wealth on display inside Sunny’s house. Ajay, in jail with a razor blade tucked under his tongue. Ajay, who naively believed that unquestioning loyalty to his masters, to Sunny and his father, would be “rewarded with protection, purpose, even love in the end”. Until one day, he stops believing. As the story builds to a manic, violence-fueled crescendo, Ajay’s character pivot has an unwitting role to play in the grizzly scene of the final pages. A complex mandala of a novel, Age of Vice contains stories within stories. It takes a certain dauntlessness, a certain off-hand disdain for approbation to attempt to impose a narrative structure on such an anarchic, trenchantly bizarre and unwieldy universe. Doubly so if it is a woman working in a genre dominated by well-established South Asian men. Kapoor’s writing is muscular, pithy and highly visual, and the sort fans have come to expect from crime heavyweights like Vikram Chandra and Suketu Mehta, but her sensibility— watchful, probing, contemplative—remains uniquely her own. In mirroring the anatomy of Delhi and the messy, complicated lives of its inhabitants, the novel strives, above all else, to break conventions of form. So, it is not too surprising that it frays towards the end; the last hundred or so pages seem to escape authorial control and unravel in puzzling directions. One hopes that this ambiguity is intentional and that future installments of the trilogy will gather these stray narrative strands and knit them back together in a way that holds. It’s worth staying with these dazzling characters, and this incredible, wild story, to find out.

FICTION Age of Vice By Deepti Kapoor Riverhead Books Published on January 3, 2023

Naheed Phiroze Patel is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her writing has appeared in the New England Review, The Guardian, Lit Hub, Poets & Writers, HuffPost, Scroll.in, BOMB Magazine, Public Books, PEN America, The Rumpus, EuropeNow Journal, Asymptote Journal and elsewhere. Her debut novel, "Mirror Made of Rain" was published by Unnamed Press in May 2022.

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Look Inside | Reading Guide

Reading Guide

Age of Vice

A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)

By Deepti Kapoor

By deepti kapoor read by vidish athavale, category: crime fiction | literary fiction, category: crime fiction | literary fiction | audiobooks.

Jan 02, 2024 | ISBN 9780593328804 | 6 x 9 --> | ISBN 9780593328804 --> Buy

Jan 10, 2023 | ISBN 9780593632680 | 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 --> | ISBN 9780593632680 --> Buy

Jan 03, 2023 | ISBN 9780593328798 | 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 --> | ISBN 9780593328798 --> Buy

Jan 03, 2023 | ISBN 9780593328811 | ISBN 9780593328811 --> Buy

Jan 03, 2023 | 1169 Minutes | ISBN 9780593612019 --> Buy

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Jan 02, 2024 | ISBN 9780593328804

Jan 10, 2023 | ISBN 9780593632680

Jan 03, 2023 | ISBN 9780593328798

Jan 03, 2023 | ISBN 9780593328811

Jan 03, 2023 | ISBN 9780593612019

1169 Minutes

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About Age of Vice

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, Oprah Daily and NPR! “Dazzling…Finally free from the book’s grip, now all I want to do is get others hooked.”— The Washington Post “A page-turning social novel…It stirs the pulse while digging into the entrenched and evolving structures and contradictions of modern India.” —NPR “Cinematic…As a storyteller, Kapoor is a natural.” — The New York Times   New Delhi, 3 a.m. A speeding Mercedes jumps the curb and in the blink of an eye, five people are dead. It’s a rich man’s car, but when the dust settles there is no rich man at all, just a shell-shocked servant who cannot explain the strange series of events that led to this crime. Nor can he foresee the dark drama that is about to unfold. Deftly shifting through time and perspective in contemporary India, Age of Vice is an epic, action-packed story propelled by the seductive wealth, startling corruption, and bloodthirsty violence of the Wadia family — loved by some, loathed by others, feared by all. In the shadow of lavish estates, extravagant parties, predatory business deals and calculated political influence, three lives become dangerously intertwined: Ajay is the watchful servant, born into poverty, who rises through the family’s ranks. Sunny is the playboy heir who dreams of outshining his father, whatever the cost. And Neda is the curious journalist caught between morality and desire. Against a sweeping plot fueled by loss, pleasure, greed, yearning, violence and revenge, will these characters’ connections become a path to escape, or a trigger of further destruction?  Equal parts crime thriller and family saga, transporting readers from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the urban energy of New Delhi, Age of Vice is an intoxicating novel of gangsters and lovers, false friendships, forbidden romance, and the consequences of corruption. It is binge-worthy entertainment at its literary best.

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Also by deepti kapoor.

About Deepti Kapoor

Deepti Kapoor grew up in northern India and worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi. The author of the novel Bad Character, she now lives in Portugal with her husband.

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Praise for Age of Vice :  “Aspiring novelists should read [ Age of Vice ]. The narrative is clean and lean, the story unputdownable. Every word counts. This is how it’s done when it’s done exactly right.”— Stephen King “Questions of guilt, complicity, idealism and disillusion arise as the story moves into the glamorous milieu of penthouse apartments and fortified rural compounds… Ms. Kapoor effortlessly changes settings from Delhi markets to prisons to remote forests on the Nepalese border to the beaches of Goa, and she’s equally comfortable writing about servants, politicians and assassins…Recommended.”— Wall Street Journal “Dazzling…For days, I was torn between gorging on Age of Vice or rationing out the chapters to make them last. Finally free from the book’s grip, now all I want to do is get others hooked…. This is a rare case of a book bounding as high as its hype.” — Ron Charles, The Washington Post “A luxe thriller, set in New Delhi, that rides the line between commercial and literary fiction so adroitly …The book has echoes of Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather,” in terms of its mobbed-up apex predators, and Vikas Swarup’s “Q & A,” the 2005 novel that was the basis for Danny Boyle’s film “Slumdog Millionaire….It’s easy to see why attention has been paid. As a storyteller, Kapoor is a natural. ”— The New York Times “A page-turning social novel…It stirs the pulse while digging into the entrenched and evolving structures and contradictions of modern India.” — NPR, “Books We Love in 2023” “Kapoor’s sprawling thriller portrays contemporary India with mesmerizing complexity.” —Oprah Daily, “Best Novels of 2023” “A complex mandala of a novel, Age of Vice contains stories within stories…Kapoor’s writing is muscular, pithy and highly visual, and the sort fans have come to expect from crime heavyweights like Vikram Chandra and Suketu Mehta, but her sensibility— watchful, probing, contemplative—remains uniquely her own.”— Chicago Review of Books “Impossible to put down; Kapoor is the real thing.” — Library Journal , STARRED review “Riveting…Kapoor paints a mesmerizing picture of violence and decadence, of struggle and hope, of corruption and redemption…[I]mpossible to put down.”— BookPage, STARRED review “Kapoor spins a dizzying ride. Weaving the backstories of Ajay, Neha, and Sunny together, Kapoor’s frenetic and colorful novel highlights the new global pecking order… But as this gripping tale shows, even the weakest deserve one last gasp of dignity.” — Booklist, STARRED review “Deeply addictive; this spellbinder would be easy to devour in one big gulp, but it’s worth savoring for Neda’s uncompromising take on what she terms India’s ‘losing age, the age of vice.’ The author possesses a talent great enough to match the massive scope of her subject.” — Publishers Weekly, STARRED review “A complex, gasp-inducing drama that accelerates to an explosive ending. Block out some time: You won’t be able to put this one down.” — GoodHousekeeping “It doesn’t take long for the reader to become invested in the Mario Puzo–esque drama of the Wadia family and their associates…A whole lot of fun.” — Kirkus “This book. This epic, crazy, shocking, mind-blowing, brutal, tender, heartbreaking book is one of the best I’ve read.” —Marlon James, Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author of Moon Witch, Spider King   “Sensationally good — huge, epic, immersive and absorbing … certain to be a book of the year.” —Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series   “This is a masterpiece. Age of Vice is epic but intimate, its glittering, sharp scenes building into an astonishing geometry. It is an unforgettable story of corruption and excess, of ruthless power and the will to fight back.”— Flynn Berry, New York Times bestselling author of Northern Spy   “ Age of Vice is a good old-fashioned gangster story , impossible to put down. It’s a novel garlanded with Shakespearean flourishes—star-crossed lovers, secret identities, complicated conspiracies—exploring timeless questions of family, loyalty, and fate.” —Rumaan Alam, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

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