Animal's People by Indra Sinha is set among survivors of the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal. Sinha writes on his blog that it "is a story about poor people coping with tragedy and injustice. The book could have been set anywhere where the chemical industry has destroyed people's lives. I had considered calling the city Receio and setting it in Brazil. It could just as easily have been set in central or south America, west Africa or the Philippines. In the end it was Khaufpur and India."
Animal's People recently won the Commonwealth writer's prize and it was shortlisted for the Man Booker.
Link: Indra Sinha's website and blog.
I learned of Sinha through an older book of his called The Cybergypsies (available in a new edition at Amazon UK). I picked it up in Italy to read on the flight home. It's a novelistic retelling of early pre-web life on the net in the late 80s and 90s. Sinha was an active member of these addictive online communities, explored through means of dial-up BBS's and text-based roleplaying adventures. Sinha tells of infiltrating a hacker board and other adventurers with activists, roleplayers, and other online pioneers that he calls cybergypsies. It's absorbing and strange reading.
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