Brilliant writing – at once precise and big – and sentence for sentence it is probably the best thing I have read in the last couple of years.
- Philip Davis, Editor, The Reader

Solo is a fascinating, devastating, and ultimately rapturous, novel about the life and daydreams of Ulrich, a one hundred year-old man from Bulgaria. Solo will be out with Fourth Estate in February 2009.

"Some time ago, before the man’s sight was lost, he read this story in a magazine. Some explorers came upon a community of semi-domesticated parrots that still uttered snatches of the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by this incredible discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists might record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by their recent disaster, died on the way."

Wondering if, unlike these hapless parrots, he has any wisdom to leave to the world, Ulrich embarks on an epic armchair journey through the twists and turns of his country’s turbulent century, and his own century of lost love and failed chemistry – until he finds his way to an astonishing epiphany of redemption and enlightenment.

Set in a country that, like the author himself, has belonged sometimes to Asia and sometimes to Europe, Solo is a book about lost roots, broken traditions, wasted ambitions and self-doubts – and the depths of lyricism by which human beings overcome those things.

Solo follows Rana Dasgupta's first book, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a collection of thirteen folktales for the age of globalisation.

Only the most gifted writers, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jonathan Safron-Foer, can hold the surreal and the real in satisfying equilibrium. This elite now welcomes Rana Dasgupta to its ranks. He makes magic realism his own, and his debut novel is superb.
- Andrew Staffell, Time Out (London)

Tokyo Cancelled was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (UK) and the Hutch Crossword Book Award (India). One tale from the book was short-listed for the BBC National Short Story Prize. At present, filmmakers from India and Australia are working on two separate scripts based on stories from Tokyo Cancelled.

These stories ... ah, they outdo the Arabian Nights for inventiveness ... One closes the book with head spinning.
- Rachel Hore, The Guardian