Neti, Neti: Not This, Not This

Twenty-five-year-old Sophie Das has moved from Shillong to Bangalore in search of work, fun and liberty. Neti, Neti follows Sophie and her free-spirited friends through offices, pubs, call centres, night streets, shopping malls, rock concerts, and the homes of Bangalore’s newly rich, as Sophie starts to feel more and more alienated in the money-mad city. A horrific murder sends her back to her hometown, where her Hamlet-quoting father and increasingly religious mother are chasing their separate dreams. Will Sophie be able to pull back from the brink and find herself a home?

Neti, Neti is one of the first Indian novels to bring to vivid life the situation of a young woman in the big city, and to do so in a way that balances cynicism with wit, warmth with uncertainty, existential doubts with the pulls of the everyday world.

"Anjum Hasan is one of the most suggestive and subtle Indian writers of her generation, unusually aware of the weight, meaning, and resonances of words. Whether as a novelist, poet, or essayist, she displays an unexpected combination of shrewd noticing and poetic insight about how small-town imaginings and cosmopolitan sophistication flow in and out of each other."
— Amit Chaudhuri