You may have heard rumours of great changes in Asia. In Capital, a novelist takes you on an intimate tour of an erupting Asian megalopolis: Delhi, capital of India. Speaking to billionaires and slum dwellers, drug dealers and bureaucrats, psychoanalysts and metal traders, he paints a dazzling portrait of a city in a moment of stupefying change.

Enormous fortunes have been made; a city has been ripped down and rebuilt. Capital shows us how this upheaval affects the private thoughts and dreams of Delhi's sixteen million residents. Through Dasgupta's acute historical and social analysis, we also understand how things came to be as they are-and how, in these days of Asia's rise, they could come to affect the lives of everyone else, all over the world.

Capital, written by Commonwealth Prize-winning author Rana Dasgupta, bears witness to the extraordinary transmogrification of India's capital city. Describing the emergence of the city from partition in 1947 to its shape-shifting present, this tour de force of non-fiction writing expounds upon the emergence of an economic powerhouse and seeks to understand the very specific history of the communities who ended up in Delhi and the way that history informs and motivates people today. But this is more than a book about one city; it's a book about all cities and the promise of a global future.

RANA DASGUPTA won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book for his debut novel Solo. He is also the author of a collection of urban folktales, Tokyo Cancelled, which was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Capital is his first work of non-fiction. Born in Canterbury, England, in 1971, he now lives in Delhi.