Sneak preview by writers....

John Matthew's debut novel, The Love Song of Luke Varkey, is the story of Luke Varkey. Young Varkey is a migrant from Kerala, struggling to make a meaning out of his close-to-the-floor life in Bombay. The story involves his love, Renuka, whom he eventually loses to the city's booming flesh trade, and his unhappy adventures as a timekeeper in a construction company in the Middle East, and his return to Bombay's sleaze.

John Matthew writes with a rare understanding of the human condition. His novel moves from Bombay to Kerala to the Middle East and back to Bombay. And, everywhere, Varkey encounters life in the raw. Very often his life and what he sees around him overwhelms him. But every time Varkey falls, he picks himself up again, and the plot further thickens. In a very clear sense John Matthew is writing about the understated resilience of the man or woman, the ubiquitous inland migrant, about whom not too much has been written about in the English fiction coming out of India.

Unlike those Indian novelists who make India look more exotic than it actually is at the expense of reality, John Matthew is concerned with the forces at play that make a human being less than what he is. Destiny might have a role in this, but so has man. Matthew's novel succeeds in finding a strong frame for his grim picture. The Love Song of Luke Varkey is a hard look up the underpants of Bombay.

- C. P. Surendran