"Wonderful poisons . . . so good it’s impossible to get rid of them, after all these years they’re still doing their work."

Writing about an unspeakable horror without sinking to sentimentality and then managing to add humour, too, is a near impossible task. But Indra Sinha pulls it off so brilliantly that it put his Animal’s People in the 2007 Booker shortlist and made it win the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

The novel, based on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, is narrated by Animal – a 19-year-old orphan who walks on all fours. He has lost his parents and his spine in the accident at the kampani (company) in Khaufpur and is "undesirable to women despite the great size of his penis". Sooner than he realises, he is sucked into politics, scams and twisted plots with Zafar, an activist campaigning against kampani and from whom Animal wants to keep away Nisha, the woman he loves.

Published in 2007.