Winner of the Betty Trask prize, and nominated for the Guardian First Fiction Prize; 'colourful, spirited and crackling with charm' (Guardian)

Life may not be easy for a sixteen-year-old girl living in small-town South India, especially when she's blessed with a family like hers: an over-dutiful sister; a brother who watches TV as an occupation; a father who drinks and bullies his family and a silent mother. When the inevitable marriage is arranged for her, fuelled by her dreams and Audrey Hepburn movies, she runs away to The City. Secretly hoping she will step right into the shoes of her favourite character, Holly Golightly, she enters the service of the benevolent Mr Aziz. Making new friends - Raju the servant with the heart of a revolutionary, Maneka the maid who disappears each night, and Armand, Mr Aziz's arrogant but seductive son - she embraces this brave new world (acquiring a taste for croissants and champagne) but soon realises she can't run forever...

Rajeev Balasubramanyam was born in Lancashire and studied at Oxford, Cambridge and Lancaster universities. He is the prize-winning author of In Beautiful Disguises. He has lived in London, Manchester, a remote Suffolk beach, Kathmandu and Hong Kong, where he was a Research Scholar in the Society of Scholars at Hong Kong University. He was a fellow of the Hemera Foundation, for writers with a meditation practice, and has been writer-in-residence at Crestone Zen Mountain Center and the Zen Center of New York City. His journalism and short fiction have appeared in the Washington Post, Economist, New Statesman, London Review of Books, Paris Review, McSweeney's and many others. He currently lives and works in Berlin.