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It took me a year to read this book. One year and exactly three days. At nine hundred pages, I spent 12 months considering how to approach the text, how to shrink it and put it in my pocket, my purse, comfortably under my arm. After 12 months I sat down, opened it, and proceeded to consume it in three days.
Sacred Games follows a Bombay police inspector and mafia Don: two men whose stories critically cross but only briefly meet. As the story unfolds, the list of characters grows to extreme proportions. For me, this is what makes the book brilliant. Each character, regardless of space given and story told, is essential and beautifully created. Somehow I found myself caring about each person, regardless of whether I like them, agreed with them, or would want to meet them in a crowded restaurant (to say nothing of a dark alley). And Chandra's prose is gorgeous in the way it drips off the page, saturating the story with details worth swimming through carefully and savoring slowly.
Lastly, as a "place book," "Sacred Games" is also a love story about Bombay. The city tells the story of each character just as they tell stories of the city. This is one of the best novels I've read, in terms of dealing with Bombay social history, geography, and economics.