Diplomat and celebrated writer Shashi Tharoor will be coming to Delhi in August to launch his new book, Riot published by Penguin. After winning the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, Tharoor's forthcoming book has raised expectations yet again. His most recent work, India: From Midnight to Millennium, is a non-fiction account of India's past and projected future inspired by the 50th anniversary of India's independence. But then, says the light-eyed Tharoor, once described as the thinking woman's pin-up, "I have far more book ideas than books."

It was The Great Indian Novel, that was his claim to fame, a political satire which interprets Mahabharata as India's modern history. In his long-awaited new novel, Shashi Tharoor experiments brilliantly with narrative form, chronicling the mystery of Prscilla Hart's death through the often contradictory account of a dozen or more characters, all of whom relate their own versions of the events surrounding her killing.