Altaf Tyrewala left Mumbai and moved to New York in 1995 for a bachelor’s degree in business administration. “In NYC, homesickness turned me into a reader, especially of fiction from the subcontinent. Over the years, I became convinced, unfortunately, that I could ‘do India’ better than the Rushdies and Roys.”

He returned to Mumbai in 1999 to work on his debut novel No God in Sight. It received rave reviews in Germany and was featured at the Frankfurt Book Fair which called it a breathless page-turner, hurtling through the landscape of Bombay and its teeming 17 million people.

The slim novel is a series of short, fast-paced narratives and its structure, according to the critics, is its strength. While writing it, the author realised that a conventional structure wouldn't work when it comes to Mumbai which has so many realities, truths and stories pressing in. From an unusual cast of characters, the one that’s most memorable is an abortionist traumatised by “unborn-baby voices” in his head and Babua, who obsessively tries to hide his impotence, an affliction that goes far beyond the realm of the sexual.

Considered by some to be finer than Aravind Adiga’s work, No God in Sight is also “a necessary antidote to images that are conveyed by Suketu Mehta and Vikram Chandra who’ve ended up casting the city in a glamorous aura,” observes reviewer Hemant Sareen. The novel has been translated into Marathi, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch, and published in the US and Canada.

Published in 2005.