Across the Lakes

Despite the seemingly unbridgeable social divides of Calcutta, a city where pleasure and indolence co-exist with extreme poverty, the lives of three young people are inextrcably connected—by family, by proximity, by accident. Political power play and corruption, petty local gangsterism, and the smell and color of Indian city life all combine with a delicate vein of humor in Amal Chatterjee's fluent first novel.