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Sacred Games
by Vikram Chandra
Seven years in the making, the author's epic-length third novel is, among other things, a gangster story set in India.
HarperCollins, 928 pages
01/09/2007
$27.95
ISBN: 0061130354
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Donna Seaman
A splendidly big, finely made book destined to dazzle a big audience. [15 Nov 2006, p.31]
Christian Science Monitor Erik Spanberg
It is the rarest of creations, an irresistible story that you simply cannot keep out of your head, one that entertains long after you have stayed up too late reading.
Houston Chronicle Fritz Lanham
Did Sacred Games need to be 900 pages long? Probably not. It sometimes reads as though Chandra shoehorned two novels and a couple of novellas between two covers. But I almost never wanted to put it down.
San Francisco Chronicle Sandip Roy
Sweaty, bloody and unapologetically melodramatic.
Los Angeles Times Susan Salter Reynolds
Chandra's genius is in the way he trusts his readers. Still, there are a few too many balls in the air. Reading Sacred Games is a bit like watching an extremely talented jazz musician improvise. He's having fun and that's contagious, but too often the audience can feel on the wrong side of an in-joke.
The New York Times Book Review Paul Gray
The appeal of Sacred Games lies in its mix of several commercially reliable formulas (the thriller, the mob saga, the police procedural) along with considerable helpings of sex and violence plus enough genre-bending twists to keep pulp aficionados off balance and intrigued.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
This is a ravishing, overexuberant stab at the Great Indian Novel, an extraordinary work of fiction that will reward you in full for your investment of time, though not without occasionally testing your patience.
Publishers Weekly
The novel eventually becomes a world, and the reader becomes a resident rather than a visitor, but living there could begin to feel excessive. [23 Oct 2006, p.30]
Library Journal Victor Or
[Chandra] does manage to transcend the traditional crime caper by relating the novel to a wide range of contemporary issues, including the relationships among heroism, religion, and terrorism. [1 Nov 2006, p.66]
Boston Globe Bruce Allen
Like Dickens before him, Chandra has blended a blood-and-thunder page-turner with an exhaustive and illuminating anatomy of a society.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Thomas Wharton
A monumental portrait of interwoven lives that lingers with a reader long after the case is closed.
The Guardian Kevin Rushby
Chandra deftly gives us the city's underbelly, and it is brutally convincing on both sides of the law.
The Observer Adams Mars-Jones
This book has everything, perhaps a little too much of everything.
Wall Street Journal Henny Sender
Perhaps Mr. Chandra's greatest strength is the compassion and understanding he has for all his flawed and needy characters.
Salon Laura Miller
Although the meat of this novel clings to the bones of a crime story, and there's certainly plenty of crime in it, the book is really a passionate tribute to contemporary India in all its vigor and vulgarity.
The Nation Carl Bromley
Sacred Games, a hulking fusion of gangland epic, roman policier and mystery thriller, involves a massive mobilization of literary talent and ambition, as if to compensate for India's marginal status in the world of crime fiction.
Daily Telegraph Jane Shilling
'All human life is here' was the old newspaper boast, and so it is in Sacred Games, delineated with a master's grandeur and scope and a miniaturist's precision and tenderness.
Daily Telegraph Siddhartha Deb
As a 900-page behemoth that includes four "Insets" – back-stories of peripheral characters – and interpretations of all major historical events in India from independence to the Maoist movement, the novel starts to raise the question of what exactly it hopes to achieve.
The New Yorker Pankaj Mishra
The elaborately contrived plot of Sacred Games seems finally to offer a vision no more compelling than the romantic brutality and cynicism of hardboiled crime fiction.
Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
Ambition alone isn't enough; believable characters are required and a coherent narrative and powerful prose and large, important themes, and on all these counts Sacred Games comes up short.
 The average user rating for this book is 9.0 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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