Deepti Kapoor has penned the form of novel that will get a writer excited—so excited that they ship it out to advance readers with a mini-bottle of champagne and a bar of chocolate. Thankfully, Age of Vice, the primary e book in a trilogy, deserves the hype. The 42-year-old Indian writer was as soon as “a straight-laced good girl” finding out journalism in New Delhi. At 20, her life turned sideways, first with the loss of life of her father, then with a tumultuous relationship that resulted in tragedy.

Kapoor’s debut novel, 2014’s A Bad Character, explores the recklessness and extra of India’s younger and rich—together with the Delhi nightlife that consumed her boyfriend. “In my thirties, I turned my life around,” she explains. “I met my husband and taught yoga in Goa. And I started to think deeply about those early years and how to account for them.” That accounting obtained brutal and opened the door to her present trilogy challenge.

The far-ranging Age of Vice contends with the rise of the Mafia Raj, human trafficking, catastrophic city improvement, violence, and obscene consumption, and ranges in setting from Uttar Pradesh in 1991 to Delhi in 2008. “I couldn’t just be an artist who was solipsistic and inward with my writing,” she says. “I had to figure out how to integrate my life into this wider political/social/economic life of the country.”

The novel’s central characters come from distinct lessons and mirror folks from completely different levels in Kapoor’s life. Take her wealthy, dashing, debauched character Sunny Wadia: As a young person, Kapoor attended a boarding faculty six hours north of Delhi that overlapped with a circle of utmost wealth. “These are the people responsible for all that pain you’re seeing. They’re sitting on top,” she says. Neda, a younger journalist who will get nudged to the approach to life beat, glides into the world of the wealthy and “throws the keys of her beat-up car to the valet at the Taj.” Kapoor, reflecting on her personal class fluidity as a journalist, says, “I had her absolute audacity. I had her shitty car. That car gave me this incredible way of navigating the city, which you can’t do when you have a driver because you’re constantly being watched.” Ajay, the third primary character, comes from the serving class. “At night, partying with these extremely wealthy people in these private homes, I remember, while being pretty high, that there was always a servant: the butler, the chauffeur, the guy who would know what you wanted before you knew what you wanted.”

Ajay is the standard coronary heart of the novel, which speaks to Kapoor’s reorientation with trendy India. Kapoor now lives in Lisbon, in a neighborhood “full of Nepalis and hipsters—it halfway feels like home.” Here she’s engaged on the second quantity within the trilogy, wanting from afar at a fictional India which, as she describes it, is a “crowded chessboard about to break into all-out war.”

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Hair: Julia Kramer

Makeup: Beatriz Texugo

Photography Assistant: Pedro Leote

Fashion Assistant: Ana Silva