It's been an awfully long time since I've been so excited by a book that I wanted to finish it so I could write a review and tell everybody how amazing it is. Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra is one of those books. It's so good that you resent having to do anything else at all during your day except read it. Who wants to eat, go to the bathroom, sleep, go to work, or any number of other trivial matters when you could be reading Sacred Games?

Some books are really strong on characterization, but weak on atmosphere and plot, or strong in one of the other areas but weak in others. Maybe, if you're lucky the author is good enough that he or she gets two out of three, but Vikram Chandra has done what I consider the ultimate in novel writing by bringing off all three of a novel writing's holy trinity to perfection.

Every single character is so fully drawn and real, you can visualize them so well that you'd recognize them walking along the street. Not just by a physical description either, but by the look in their eyes, the manner in which an emotion affects them, and by the energy they exude.

You'd swear that Chandra was looking over the midwives' shoulder on the day each character was born, so intimate and detailed is the vision we have of each of them. But then again a good author is parent, midwife, teacher, spiritual advisor, matchmaker, mortician, as well as biographer to his or her characters. Chandra fulfills all his duties along those lines as he guides us through the lives of his people.

He is so dedicated he even follows one into the afterlife for him to tell his story. But after the notorious gangster Ganesh Gaitonde, one of the most wanted men in Mumbai, takes his own life, he lingers to tell his story to the policeman who was there at his death. Technically he is not telling Inspector Sartaj Singh anything directly, but rather using him as a confessor figure in his mind's eye to tell his life's story.

Chandra does such a magnificent job of relaying Gaitonde's rise from the street to the highest echelon of gangsterhood, that there are times when I found myself getting anxious for him to succeed and believing all Gaitonde's justifications for killing somebody. To be able to generate such great empathy for a character who normally wouldn't be given the time of day in a book except to show up to kill the hero, or be a shadowy figure in the background, is in itself an amazing feat.