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Viking editor Will Hammond has bought world rights to The Temple-Goers, a literary début by Aatish Taseer, described by V S Naipaul as “a writer to watch”. The deal, Hammond's first for a fiction title and Viking's first world rights deal in literary fiction for some years, was conducted by Andrew Kidd of Aitken Alexander for a “very good sum”.
The novel is set in Delhi and is said to herald the arrival of “the cool new urban voice of modern India”. The narrator is a wealthy, cosmopolitan member of India's English-speaking elite, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with his personal trainer, a charismatic young man on the make. When the trainer becomes a suspect in his own wife's murder, the well-connected narrator pulls strings to shift the blame onto the trainer's homosexual brother-in-law.
Taseer is the son of a Pakistani businessman and politician. Hammond compared his “sophisticated and unflinching” voice to that of Bret Easton Ellis. Penguin m.d. Helen Fraser added that The Temple-Goers was “funny, sharp, beautifully observed social comedy, which gradually turns into something much more menacing and peculiar”.
The novel is due out in March 2010 as a royal trade paperback.