Beach Boy — Ardashir Vakil

In this award-winning novel, set in Bombay in the early 1970s, Cyrus Readymoney, the eight-year-old son of a successful shipping broker and a beautiful former tennis star, introduces us to his magical universe of movies and mischief, sex and samosas, tennis tournaments and truancy from school. His mind is filled with daydreams of becoming a grown-up, but with the collapse of his parents' marriage and his father's sudden death, Cyrus finds himself caught between the innocence of youth and the responsibilities of adulthood.

With an acute ear for the nuances of Indian English and a comic appreciation of a boy's life, Ardashir Vakil creates an extraordinarily vivid tableau of India while at the same time drawing a rich portrait of adolescence and its appetites.