Great Eastern Hotel

‘Sprawling … exuberant …compelling … allow yourself to be immersed in this Great Calcutta Novel that captures both the sweep of history and the pulse of individual lives’ Scroll.in

‘Great Eastern Hotel isn’t just a love letter to a lost city – it’s a lusty, brawling, cigarette-stained, gin-soaked declaration that history belongs as much to the pickpocket in the shadows as to the statesman in the ballroom’ The Statesman

‘Joshi scales down the event calendar and blows up the human drama so skillfully that his ordinary characters become magnificent creatures, anything but hapless victims of history … The novel thrums with a visceral passion for its subject’ Frontline

‘Has there been a novel of such scale since A Suitable Boy? … this novel serves as a meditation on what was, what is and perhaps what will be’ Outlook India

‘Sprawling and ambitious … There is a forceful and robust beauty to Joshi’s prose … Joshi’s city teems with stories and he peoples it with a riotous assortment of personalities’ Open Magazine

‘Every phrase and image has been honed to perfection … Read it for a masterclass in the joy of writing from the heart’ Deccan Herald

‘Joshi has managed the impossible with this book – he has captured every nuance and quirk of Calcutta and its people, everything that makes the city both unique and ubiquitously Indian … an extraordinary achievement … I am so happy I read this book’ The Asian Age

‘A film-maker’s novel, so vividly immersive it makes mid-forties Calcutta a living being, at once human and epic, a Joycean polyphony of overlapping lives and a granular history of the nation during wartime’ Jeet Thayil, author of Narcopolis

‘Glorious, brimming with life, Great Eastern Hotel contains multitudes. Ruchir Joshi captures crumbling empires and wayward human lives in this headlong, sensory dive into 1940s Calcutta. A towering novel – one for our times, and for all time’ Nilanjana S. Roy, author of Our Freedoms

Ruchir Joshi was born and grew up in Calcutta, but now lives in Delhi. A trained and practising filmmaker and photographer, his first novel, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh is a sweeping vision of a newly powerful India.