Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain is an unforgettable reading experience, a contemporary Thousand and One Nights — with an eighteenth-century warrior-poet (now reincarnated as a typewriting monkey) and an Indian student home from college in America switching off as our Scheherazades. Ranging from bloody battles in colonial India to college anomie in California, from Hindu gods to MTV, Chandra's novel is engrossing, enthralling, impossible to put down — a remarkable meditation on quests and homecomings, good and evil, storytelling and redemption.