In Solo – which is ultimately a meditation on what it means to measure success, failure and time itself – Rana Dasgupta, ... , has created a work that is both literary and compelling, a prize-worthy feat indeed.

Solo is mannered in its strangeness, but utterly unforgettable in its humanity. It hums the inner and outer melodies of a life lived solo, until it becomes a discordant symphony of the human condition. This lifts it from a freak show to the kind of "philharmonic" novel that reminds us why we will always need to tell the extraordinary stories of people's ordinary lives. So that, like Ulrich, we can sift through those hundred years when "the world itself has become nonsense", and see more deeply into the "great black ocean of forgotten things".

WHAT a delight to find a novelist unfazed by the 21st century, confidently tracing the wrong turnings of the past 100 years, soaring insightfully over the mess of global developments that constitute the quagmire of today.

What a delight to read a fiction writer fully astute about life, love, culture and politics, catching in his cross-hairs ideologies, sciences, personal relationships, the terrors of ageing, the madness of music, organised crime, family tragedies -- even the novel genre itself -- examining them with dazzling clarity.