The Illicit Happiness of Other People Manu Joseph in conversation with Patrick French

The Illicit Happiness of Other People is a sparkling, comic novel set in modern India from the acclaimed author of Serious Men.

Seventeen-year-old Unni has done something terrible. As his father, a nocturnal anarchist whose wife fantasises about his early death, begins investigating, he unravels a secret that shakes his family to the core. Set in Madras in the 1980s, this powerful and darkly comic story probes into a dangerous interpretation of absolute truth, a circle of talented schizophrenics and the love of a boy for a beautiful girl.

Manu Joseph is a columnist with International Herald Tribune, the global edition of The New York Times. SERIOUS MEN, his first novel, won the PEN/Open Book award and The Hindu Best Fiction award. It was shortlisted for The Man Asian Literary Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and was one of Huffington Post's Best Books of 2010. He will be speaking with Patrick French, author of India - A Portrait,Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division and The World is What it Is, the authorised biography of V.S. Naipaul.