A breath-taking family story that will change the way you think of India

When Skanda's father Toby dies, estranged from Skanda's mother and from the India he once loved, it falls to Skanda to return his body to his birthplace. This is a journey that takes him halfway around the world and deep within three generations of his family, whose fractures, frailties and toxic legacies he has always sought to elude.

Both an intimate portrait of a marriage and its aftershocks, and a panoramic vision of India's half-century - in which a rapacious new energy supplants an ineffectual elite - The Way Things Were is an epic novel about the pressures of history upon the present moment. It is also a meditation on the stories we tell and the stories we forget; their tenderness and violence in forging bonds and in breaking them apart.

Set in modern Delhi and at flashpoints from the past four decades, fusing private and political, classical and contemporary to thrilling effect, this book confirms Aatish Taseer as one of the most arresting voices of his generation.

This is the sort of novel that gathers intelligence and power through repetition, incantation, and time. As the pages build . . . these characters grow into two of the most memorable creations in Indian fiction. These scenes have an aching power that Taseer amplifies with his exquisite, booming prose . . . as if Taseer has taken Naipaul and titrated him with Proust . . . He has written the best Indian novel of the last decade.