Capital · A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi

At the turn of the twenty-first century, acclaimed novelist Rana Dasgupta arrived in Delhi with a single suitcase. He had no intention of staying for long. But the city beguiled him - he 'fell in love and in hate with it' - and fourteen years later, he has made Delhi his home. His arrival coincided with a period of intense change - India's economy had been recently opened up to the world, plunging Delhi into a tumult of destruction and creation.

Capital tells the story of Delhi's journey from Walled City to World City. It is a story of extreme wealth and power, of land grabs and a city physically changed almost beyond recognition; everything that was slow, intimate and idiosyncratic has become the fast, vast and generic; every aspect of life in the city has been affected - for the poor, the middle classes and the super-rich.

Through a series of conversations and encounters with billionaires and bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts, Rana Dasgupta captures this astonishing, intoxicating, at times terrifying transformation. Capital is significant not only for the story it tells of Delhi, and India, but what it means for the West's - for everybody's - future.