I have exaggerated certain aspects of our urban lives, but almost everything in the book draws from what I’ve seen around me all these years, things I read in the news, stories I’ve heard from friends and family.Īt the heart of the book is an absence, the missing daughter, which is always much more difficult to conjure and to sustain. It will mean different things to whoever reads it, I hope, but in my reading it is primarily an examination of the way we currently live-the ease with which we look away from suffering, the need for hierarchy, to feel superior to one another. I don’t consider the book a warning in the sense that the events and world I describe may soon transpire. I can’t say I’ve thought of Leila in those terms. Dystopias are generally coded with moral warnings or they are fables. ‘Leila’ is a dystopia, set in the near-future, I imagine. But the power of the story and the missing child make you read recklessly, relentlessly, even as you want to slow down to make this last.

Its high walls, its sectors with coded names like Purity, its flyroads that ignore the “Slummers' and the dirt they generate, its gangs of goons with their alcohol in plastic bottles and their slogans, the politician as “man-god', all these make for chilling reading. Standard disclosure: Prayaag Akbar sent me his novel Leila to read and you will see from its cover that I found it a compelling work that had me right at the beginning where we are told of an older couple’s longing for a lost child.

Prayaag akbar