Gods and Ends

About this book

SHORTLISTED FOR JCB PRIZE FOR LITERATURE, TATA LIT LIVE FIRST BOOK (FICTION) AWARD ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL LITERARY DEBUTS IN 2021 AN UNFLINCHING PORTRAIT OF A ROMAN CATHOLIC COMMUNITY IN THE BOMBAY SUBURB OF ORLEM A DARK STORY OF CHARACTERS GRAPPLING WITH LOVE, LOSS AND SIN 'Gods and Ends is an intriguing debut with Lindsay's biting sense of humour and quirky voice. Part of the attraction lies in its unconventional form and structure.'-Jury, JCB Prize for Literature, 2021 'Vivid and unsentimental, a striking debut in the lineage of Naipaul and Nagarkar'-Anjali Joseph, Author of Saraswati Park '...savagely drawn series of sketches...'- Jerry Pinto, author of Em and the Big Hoom '...a class apart...'- Altaf Tyrewala, author of No God in Sight, The Ministry of Hurt Sentiments '...one of the bitingly humorous voices from India...'- Jaideep Varma, author and National Award-winning director of Leaving Home Philomena Sequeira knows what she wants by the time she turns fourteen. Her father wants something else. Life is unyielding for the tenants of the rundown Obrigado Mansion in Orlem, a Roman Catholic parish in suburban Bombay. They grapple with love, loss and sin, surrounded by abused wives and repressed widows, alcoholic husbands and dubious evangelists, angry teenagers and ambivalent priests, all struggling to make sense of circumstances they have no control over. Gods and Ends takes up multiple threads of individual stories to create a larger picture of darkness beneath a seemingly placid surface. It is about intersecting lives struggling to accept change as homes turn into prisons. This is a book about invisible people in a city of millions, and the claustrophobia they rarely manage to escape from.