RUN AND HIDE by MISHRA, PANKAJ

Aseem, Virendra and Arun meet each other in IIT– a place regarded as the gateway to success, wealth, and fame by all who enter it. All except Arun. After university, he becomes a translator of Hindi novels, and watches Virendra become a hedge fund mogul in America and Aseem a swashbuckling media darling in Delhi. Eventually, Arun is drawn into a love affair with a beautiful, wounded young woman, even as Virendra and Aseem’s lives fall spectacularly apart. And in this love affair and its violent denouement, Arun realizes he is as implicated in the world he has disowned as his friends were. That he too, like them, is as sullied, as compromised. Run and Hide is the story of an India that has transformed itself in the last twenty years, both materially and morally, and it tells more deeply and truly how those two things are wholly entwined than any novel in recent years. Profound, deeply human, perfectly realized, this is a magisterial work – and Mishra’s masterpiece.