‘In life you never get what you deserve: you get what you negotiate’. That line would be enough to get the whole of new India lunging for Vikas Swarup’s latest. We live in a world of negotiation—children negotiating for TV watching rights, not to mention people negotiating for salaries, hostage negotiations and all the other kinds that have made ‘negotiation’ a buzzword. But then, Vikas Swarup specialises in what I tend to think of as the conceptual novel: a fast-moving page-turner which is idea-based and therefore turns into an allegory of sorts, making it ideal for a world which believes in self-help books and Paulo Coelho.