Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (The Hungry Student) - Softcover

And now Bombay gets its Boswell, his chronicle as sprawling and enchanting as his subject (India Today)

Suketu Mehta's MAXIMUM CITY is quite extraordinary - he writes about Bombay with an unsparing ferocity born of his love, which I share, for the old pre-Mumbai city which has now been almost destroyed by corruption, gangsterism and neo-fascist politics, its spirit surviving in tiny moments and images which he seizes upon as proof of the survival of hope; and the quality of his investigative reportage, the skill with which he persuades hoodlums and murderers to open up to him, is quite amazing. It's the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis, my city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read (Salman Rushdie)

There is almost nothing that this book doesn't reveal about Bombay in startling, emotional, and humorous detail. Along with V.S. Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City is
probably the greatest non-fiction book written about India.

(Akhil Sharma)

'Sprawling, epic, vibrant--and more than a little scary--Maximum City does justice to its monumental subject... there's not a boring moment as Mehta's sparkling prose and prodigious descriptive powers make the distant city seem as vital to us as the neighborhood in which we live' Four Stars (Francine Prose, People Magazine)

Brave, honest, and addictive (Mohsin Hamid)

...unquestionably one of the most memorable non-fiction books to come out of India for many years, and there is little question that it will become the classic study of Bombay. (William Dalrymple)

'He gives us a city that "is a mass dream of the peoples of India," and although the dream includes a few nightmares, he makes you never want to wake up' -- Shashi Tharoor, LA Times (Shashi Tharoor, LA Times)

MAXIMUM CITY is part nightmare and part millennial hallucination... Suketu Mehta has taken travel writing to an entirely new level. This is a gripping, compellingly readable account of a love affair with a city: I couldn't put it down (Amitav Ghosh)

Suketu Mehta tells the stories of slum-dwellers, dancing girls, hitmen and poets, all of whom have come to Bombay to make it. With a clear but non-judgmental voice, his is an outstanding tale of the exhilarating city in which he grew up (Economist)

Like one of Bombay's teeming chawls, MAXIMUM CITY is part nightmare and part millennial hallucination, filled with detail, drama and a richly varied cast of characters. In his quest to plumb both the grimy depths and radiant heights of the continent that is Bombay, Suketu Mehta has taken travel writing to an entirely new level. This is a gripping, compellingly readable account of a love affair with a city: I couldn't put it down (Amitav Ghosh)

Bombay's story, told through the lives, often desperately near the edge, of some of the people who live there. The complex texture of these extraordinary tales is threaded together by Suketu Mehta's own history of growing up in Bombay and returning to live there after a 21-year absence. Hitmen, dancing girls, cops, movie stars, poets, beggars and politicians - Suketu loooked at the city through their eyes, and in looking found the city within himself.