Beautiful Thing

Sonia Faleiro is the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars, which was named a book of the year by the Guardian, the Observer, the Sunday Times, NPR and the Economist, and a novella, The Girl. She is a co-founder of Deca, a cooperative of award-winning writers. Her work has been supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Investigative Fund, and appears in the New York Times, the Financial Times, Granta, 1843, MIT Technology Review and Harper's. She lives in London.Leela is a bar dancer in Mumbai. She is young, beautiful, determined and hedonistic. And she is also self destructive, cynical and full of despair. When the dance bars in the city are banned, the young woman and her friends find their worlds slowly giving way. Journalist Sonia Faleiro followed Leela before and after the ban, meeting her friends, her lovers, and her family. In this extraordinary work of reportage, she draws an unforgettable portrait of the bar dancer and her subterranean night-time world.A tour de force of reportage, whose depth, insight and resonance make it the equal of the best fiction."Faleiro brings a novelist's eye for detail and a depth of empathy to her work. A magnificent book of reportage that is also endowed with all the terror and beauty of art"Brilliant ... It's most outstanding quality to my eye is the window it offers on the widespread sexual repression that exists in India today, and the murky middle-class morality that rules it"A small masterpiece of observation ... Opens up a hidden world with startling insight and intimacy"