PositiveChicago Review of BooksThe ambitious first installment in a trilogy that weaves the sweeping pathos and entangled fealties of a mafia family saga with performative violence and operatic debauchery, set in a landscape that evokes the stark, earthy cinematic style of recent crime drama hits ... Kapoor manages to widen the novel’s scope from being just an entertaining thriller to a work with something important to say about modern India ... Age of Vice contains stories within stories. It takes a certain dauntlessness, a certain off-hand disdain for approbation to attempt to impose a narrative structure on such an anarchic, trenchantly bizarre and unwieldy universe ... In mirroring the anatomy of Delhi and the messy, complicated lives of its inhabitants, the novel strives, above all else, to break conventions of form. So, it is not too surprising that it frays towards the end; the last hundred or so pages seem to escape authorial control and unravel in puzzling directions. One hopes that this ambiguity is intentional and that future installments of the trilogy will gather these stray narrative strands and knit them back together in a way that holds. It’s worth staying with these dazzling characters, and this incredible, wild story, to find out.
