RIVER OF GODS

August 15th, 2047. Happy Hundredth Birthday, India...In the mid twenty-first century, Mother India is all the things she is now - ancient and vibrant, poor yet staggeringly rich. Diverse, violent, beautiful and terrible, thrilling and bewildering. A nation choked with peoples and cultures, riven with almost seismic contrasts and contradictions. Nearly two billion humans crowd the subcontinent and her seething cities - the cyberabads - where timeless culture and the highest of high-technologies meet to spawn new societies, and - possibly - new sentient species. RIVER OF GODS is a book as big and brawling as its subject. Its magnificently diverse array of characters - from genetically enhanced ''Brahmins'' to body-part runners, American scientists to ''Dharma-cops'' (government Artificial Intelligence assassins) - are drawn in interwoven stories towards a cosmic-scale conclusion that will forever change the way we understand ourselves, life, and the universe we inhabit.