Its young author, Rana Dasgupta, was born in England but travelled to Delhi at the turn of the century to join his girlfriend and to learn more about his Indian father's origins and that side of his family.
He ended up staying and experiencing first-hand a decade of unprecedented growth and transformation from ''walled city to world city'' after the former centrally planned closed economy embraced free-market policies and became one of the world's largest economies.
The city became the business process outsourcing (BPO) capital of the world. Telecommunications companies, IT firms and other global industry giants set up there blessed with a huge, educated and English-speaking workforce, and canny local entrepreneurs became overnight millionaires, a situation the author sums up with: ''people who 15 years ago had not seen a microwave now drive Lamborghinis''.
But while there have been amazing changes, the promise the future held (what Dasgupta calls the initial ''utopian clamour'') was rapidly overshadowed by land grabs, continued corruption, and a gross power imbalance between an elite class and the vast majority of residents. He laments the fact the pace of change has been so great the city has become unrecognisable to its own inhabitants, and ''the conversion of all that was slow, intimate and idiosyncratic into the fast, vast and generic''.
But he describes ''falling'' for the city (even if it is often in hate as much as love), and describes it as a person, with its own emotions.
Dasgupta's writing is evocative and his descriptions of the smells, sounds and tastes palpable, from the chaos of traffic, which seems to move to its own inexplicable rules, the majestic elephants that lumber with their drivers along the same roads, to the smell of frangipani in the ''prettiest month'' of March.
He weaves interviews with a range of residents - from mega-rich entrepreneurs to slum-dwellers, health and social workers to bureaucrats - with a comprehensive and fascinating explanation of Delhi's and India's complicated and colourful religious, social, cultural, political and geographical history, combined with his own thoughts and interpretations.
He explains how modern Delhi was born out of the ''catastrophe'' of India's Partition and how the legacy of that violence (one million were killed and many tens of thousands raped or abducted in its immediate aftermath) still looms large and is responsible for much of the violence in the city today.
Females have suffered in ''India's rape capital'' as ''the early days of corporate euphoria'' allowed young women unprecedented opportunities outside the traditional home environment, but which pushed them into conflict with men in the traditional patriarchal society.
He writes of the shame and trauma of Partition, and says Delhi is a city ''emotionally broken'' because of it. He describes how the displaced rebuilt their lives after Partition, and shows how the cycle continues today as the city expands, farmland is grabbed for more development, rural workers are forced to the city to find work, live in slums on the city's limits, and are continually forced further out to rebuild their communities and lives with no government support as the city expands even further.
The pressure on infrastructure - land, water and the health system - is immense, and he describes how corruption (it is estimated 80% of bureaucrats are corrupt) is necessary in order to get anything done but stymies any meaningful progress or efficiency.
In Capital (the title is apt, reflecting both the place of Delhi as the seat of the Indian Government, and its new-found riches), Dasgupta plunges the reader headfirst into a fast, frenetic journey that is both his and India's.
At once terrifying and exhilarating, it is one hell of a ride.
The ODT has five copies of Capital by Rana Dasgupta (RRP $42), to give away courtesy of Text Publishing. For your chance to win a copy, email helen.speirs@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and "Capital Book Competition'' in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, May 13.
Winners of last week's giveaway, Precious and the Mystery of the Missing Lion, by Alexander McCall Smith, courtesy of Polygon and Newsouth Books, were: Raewyn Whitworth, of Cromwell, Adele Allan, of Alexandra, Elaine McDonald, of Dunedin, Elizabeth Robertson, of Christchurch, and Sharon Finnie, of Moeraki.
- Helen Speirs is ODT books editor.
