Maximum City

By Suketu Mehta

Categories: Travel

Maximum City (2004) is writer Suketu Mehta's portrait of Bombay, the city where he spent his childhood, written after returning with his family to live there in the late 1990s. Mehta spends time with gangsters and police officers, Bollywood film-makers, bar dancers, slum dwellers, politicians of the Shiv Sena and survivors of the riots of 1992 and 1993. He explores how so many people survive in one of the world's most crowded cities and why newcomers keep arriving.

Recommended by 1 person

• Fareed Zakaria: “It’s a vivid, pulsating account of life at the top and at the bottom -- mostly at the bottom.”