Sacred Games is a crime thriller set in Mumbai. Sartaj Singh, a seasoned and cynical Bombay police officer, is summoned by an anonymous tip one morning, by a voice which promises him an opportunity to capture the powerful Ganesh Gaitonde, criminal overlord of the G-Company. The confrontation between Sartaj and Ganesh lies at the heart of this epic novel. As the stakes mount and Sartaj seeks knowledge of his prey, it becomes clear that the game the two players thought they were engaged in is in fact part of a much larger scenario, one that expands beyond their city and implicates the planet.

Around this story, Vikram Chandra has constructed an opulent, exhilarating narrative, one that bridges the serious and the popular, recalling the great and capacious novels of the 19th century.

Sacred Games moves through many landscapes: a police officer falls in love; a young woman comes to the big city to become a film star; a young girl tries to understand what has become of her family in the midst of political chaos and mass murder; a widow battles poverty and the urban pressures that distort the lives of her young sons; a freshly-trained, inexperienced intelligence officer leads an army patrol into the bleak iciness of Himalayan peaks; a canny, intelligent woman takes some very shady money to produce television shows about the sufferings of women; an idealistic graduate student, hounded by the police and local politicians, seeks refuge in the ranks of Maoist guerillas; a right-wing religious leader conducts an enormous yagna or sacrifice for the citizens of Bombay; a famous, ferocious bhai leads his company to victory after victory, and discovers the strange emptiness of getting what he wants.

All these lives, simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, flow around and into each other to make the shape of the novel, which holds what the last words of Love and Longing in Bombay reach for — “only life itself.”