Quarterlife

New Yorker • The Best Books of 2024

"[Quarterlife is] by a distance the best debut of the year." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"A fearless achievement.... An urgent, vital orchestration.... Rege’s seriousness of purpose runs like an electrical wire through the book." —James Wood, New Yorker

“A superb read . . . both moving and inspiring.” —Jeet Thayil, author of Narcopolis

Quarterlife is a groundbreaking portrait of a nation on the cusp of a new age. A group of young people converge in Mumbai after an election brings the divisive Bharat Party to power: Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant lured home by the promise of “better days,” is accompanied by Amanda, a restless New Englander eager to live her ideals through a social impact fellowship in a slum. Meanwhile, Naren’s brother Rohit, the charismatic talent scout, sets out to explore his roots in the countryside and falls in with the fiery young men that drive the Hindu nationalist machine. As they each come to grips with the new India, their journeys coalesce into a riveting milieu characterized by brutal debates and desires as fraught as they are compulsive. The result is an ever-widening chorus that feeds into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets—and the simmering unrest erupts.

Quarterlife is as sweeping as it is intimate. With grace and precision, Devika Rege lays bare the moral and psychological roots of political belief in a time of reckoning for democracies worldwide. No one is spared, not even the writer. An urgent and prismatic debut, Quarterlife announces Rege as an evocative new voice in fiction and an author who is unafraid to test the limits of what the novel can achieve.