From one of the world's truly great writers, Fury is a wickedly brilliant & pitch-black comedy about a middle-aged professor who finds himself in New York City in the summer of 2000. Not since the Bombay of Midnight's Children have a time & place been so intensely & accurately captured in a novel. Fury opens on a New York living at breakneck speed in an age of unprecedented decadence. Malik Solanka, , a Cambridge-educated self-made millionaire originally from Bombay, arrives looking, perversely, for escape. This former philosophy professor is the inventor of the hugely popular doll, Little Brain, whose multiform ubiquity
- as puppet, cartoon & masked woman
- now rankles with him. He becomes frustratingly estranged from his own creation. At the same time, his marriage is disintegrating: it escalates into a rage-filled battle, & Solanka very nearly commits an unforgivable act. Horrified by the fury within him, he flees home & family & becomes a sort of spiritual mendicant
- except that he has a credit card & a duplex on the Upper West Side. Solanka discovers that he has come to a city Roiling with anger, where cab drivers spout invective & a serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete, a metropolis whose population is united by petty spats & bone-deep resentments. His own thoughts, emotions & desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. Solanka's navigation of his new world makes for a hugely entertaining & compulsively readable novel. Fury is a pitiless comedy that lays bare the darkest side of human nature with spectacular insight & much glee.