APT9 Book Club: 'The Book of Chocolate Saints' (2018)
10.30AM Thu 30 May 2019
QAG | Members lounge | Ticketed
Take a step out of your comfort zone this season as we delve into a five-part focus on writing from across Asia and the Pacific, linking to themes and histories presented in APT9.
Book 5: The Book of Chocolate Saints (2018), Jeet Thayil
The Book of Chocolate Saints explores our deepest urges in a novel that is sexy, dangerous and entirely uncompromising. In swooning, hypnotic prose that consolidates his reputation as one of the most exciting writers of his generation, Jeet Thayil paints a hallucinatory portrait of an ambiguous soul, Francis Newton Xavier: a self-destructive figure living a wild existence of excess in pursuit of his unwavering aesthetic vision. It is intoxicating, blazingly intelligent literary fiction — a strange and beautiful hymn to an artistic life lived fearlessly.