num_pages: 256
description: Winner of the Barnes &amp; Noble 2001 Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction; finalist in the First Fiction category of the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Awards. "Vibrantly alive, beautifully written, full of wonderfully rich and deeply human characters."
  A compelling spiritual quest viewed through the color and tumult of life in a Bombay apartment block.
At the opening of this masterful debut novel, Vishnu, the resident odd-job man, lies dying on the apartment building staircase he inhabits, while his neighbors, the Pathaks and the Asranis, argue over who will pay for an ambulance. As the action spirals up through the floors of the building, the dramas of the residents' lives unfold: Mr. Jalal's obsessive search for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja's longing for the wife he has lost; the comic elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi movie.Suffused with Hindu mythology, this story of one apartment building becomes a metaphor for the social and religious division of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the sours progress through the various stages of existence. As Vishnu closes in on the riddle of his own mortality, he begins to wonder whether he might not be the god Vishnu, guardian not only of the fate of the building and its occupants, but of the entire universe.
language: English
title: The Death of Vishnu
titlecomplete: The Death of Vishnu
genres: Fiction, Indian Literature, Asia, India, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 9112
series: The Hindu Gods
awards: awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Booker Prize
category: Longlist, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: McKitterick Prize, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Kiriyama Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Corine Internationaler Buchpreis
category: Rolf Heyne Buchpreis, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company