This rigid hierarchy is presided over by the nameless, faceless city council and policed by vigilante thugs known as “repeaters”. The privileged live in the security and comfort of private enclaves, divided by caste, religion and community, 60 feet walls separating them from the filth, grime and degrading poverty of the rest of the population. Yes, I have exaggerated certain aspects of our urban lives but almost everything in the novel goes on around us already.'Īt over 205 pages, Akbar constructs a city-world set in an unspecified near-future where the forces of exclusion and tribalism reign supreme.

'Many of the ideas that entered the book I first touched upon in my journalism. With Leila, he continues to engage with the same themes through fiction. As a reporter and editor, Akbar has written extensively on caste, class, communalism and the myriad other fault-lines that dominate the Indian political landscape. “I’m not as interested in what may come as what already is,” says the 35-year-old journalist-turned-author, who is also the son of noted former journalist and current Indian minister of state for external affairs M.J. And that's exactly what makes Prayaag Akbar's debut novel Leila such a gripping – and terrifying – read. But at its core, the best of dystopian fiction is less an interrogation of imagined futures, and more a witness to current realities. Implicit in this reading of dystopia is a self-preserving – and usually self-deluding – sense of optimism, that however bad the future looks, we're not there yet. This is an impression that is encouraged by the genre's links to science fiction and its explorations of how technology interacts with totalitarianism – whether it's the Stalinist panopticon of George Orwell's 1984, or the post-apocalyptic technocracy of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. We've been trained to think of dystopian fiction as prophecy, as a warning of dark times to come.

Prayaag akbar books