Hours and hours of a Sunday afternoon, better part of a Saturday evening after work or even holidays, spent frantically looking for that perfect book. One that will feel right the moment you hold it in your hands. You read the first page and then are filled with this overwhelming desire to read on and never stop till you have devoured the book. Till you have assimilated every fine detail, every intricate sentence, you feel restless and unsatiated. The Last Song of Dusk, by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, is one such book. It makes all those hours spent hunting for a novel worthwhile.

In the sprawling backdrop of Udaipur and Bombay in colonial India, Shanghavi unravels a book so riveting that you cannot help but read on. The narrative transports the reader to the 1920’s to live and experienc the joy, grief, love, loss, separation, of Anuradha and Vardhaman Gandharva.

The colorful language is fresh and really bold. The personifications, allegories, analogies, are what makes it interesting. It has a mix of fable, magic and folklore and follows in the steps of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Paulo Coelho. His style of bold story telling will really go down well with those bored with an overdose of Jhumpa Lahiri’s tales of second generation indian-Americans (hope she comes up with something more refreshing next time).