A literary sensation in South Asia, this memorable novel confronts issues of sexuality in India through a love triangle with a brother and sister falling for the same man. 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 an artist lodging in their family home in Pune, Western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mother’s musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But he’s also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history, and no plans for the future.
Translated from the Marathi by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Sachin Kundalkar’s elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare novel explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger in order 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
“A mesmerizing novel of heartbreak, memory, and the ease of falling in love set against the impossibility of fully knowing other people.” —Kamila Shamsie, noted author
“One of the most shocking and brilliantly worded stories of love. . . . The story 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.” ―Buzzfeed
“Cobalt Blue reads like a love song . . . Kundalkar’s writing is masterful in its play of voice, capturing through his characters the claustrophobia of a small town, their longing to escape a middle class existence, and how love, and being in love, has the ability to transform every small detail from the mundane to the magnificent.”—Scroll.in