SynopsisNine-year-old Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari and Faiz. When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit.
But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighbourhood. Jai, Pari and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force and rumours of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again.
Drawing on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is extraordinarily moving, flawlessly imagined and a triumph of suspense. It captures the fierce warmth, resilience and bravery that can emerge in times of trouble and carries the reader headlong into a world that, once encountered, is impossible to forget.
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Binding: HardBack
About the author
Deepa Anappara worked as a journalist in Mumbai and Delhi, and her reports on the impact of poverty and religious violence on the education of children won the Developing Asia Journalism Award, the Every Human Has Rights Media Award and the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism. A portion of her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award and the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a First Novel. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where she is currently studying for a creative-critical writing PhD on a CHASE doctoral fellowship.
