Synopses & Reviews
Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity. Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with the same man, an artist lodging in their family home in Pune, in western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mothers musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But hes also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history, and no plans for the future. When he runs away with Anuja, he overturns the familys lives.
Translated from Mahrati by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Sachin Kundalkars elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare novel, nominated for the prestigious Crossword Book Award and the DSC South Asia Prize, explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger to examine a generation in transition. Intimate, moving, sensual, and wry in its portrait of young love, Cobalt Blue is a frank and lyrical exploration of gay life in India that recalls the work of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst—of people living in emotional isolation, attempting to find long-term intimacy in relationships that until recently were barely conceivable to them.
Review
"I found the book’s fragmentary, collage-like structure intriguing and original, as was Jerry Pinto’s translation, and felt that here was a refreshing new voice for a new generation" Anita Desai, three-time Booker Prize nominee and author of Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Baumgartner’s Bombay
Review
"In the sense of navigating the inner world of an adolescent in the first person, Cobalt Blue may be considered a high-quality 'coming-of-age' novel. It also explores the discovery, resulting confusion, and bravado of homosexuality in a hostile environment....This book could be read in one sitting, over the course of one enjoyable day. However, the impact of its characters and what we learn from them would last quite a while longer." The Hindu
Review
"A mesmerizing novel of heartbreak, memory, and the ease of falling in love set against the impossibility of fully knowing other people." Kamila Shamsie, author of A God in Every Stone
Review
"Cobalt Blue is the kind of book that Franz Kafka called the 'axe for the frozen sea within us'...
this novel, with its complex narrative design and daring imagination, easily surpasses most English-language fiction that has appeared in India so far this year."
Live Mint
Review
"One of the most shocking and brilliantly worded stories of love
[It] will stick with you, and long after you read it, the novel will play on your mind, forcing you to revisit it from time to time." Andre Borges, "34 Books by Indian Authors That Everyone Should Read," Buzzfeed
About the Author
Sachin Kundalkar is a novelist, playwright and filmmaker who won a National Award for Best Screenplay for the film Gandha in 2008.
Jerry Pinto's debut novel, Em and the Big Hoom, won the 2012 Hindu Literary Prize, and his novel Helen won a National Film Award for Best Book on Cinema. They both live in Mumbai.