Solo [Paperback] Dasgupta, Rana

A century-old blind Bulgarian man sits in his crumbling Sofia apartment, spinning two parallel lives — the one he lived, and the one he imagines he could have. Ulrich's real life unfolds across 20th-century Bulgaria: failed chemistry experiments, a doomed love affair, the slow rot of communism. His imagined life is wilder — New York in the '80s, wealth, ambition, moral collapse. Rana Dasgupta weaves these threads into something hallucinatory and profound, a meditation on regret, possibility, and what happens when a nation's dreams decay alongside a man's. The prose is lush and strange, the structure daring. This is literary fiction that takes risks and lands them. For readers who loved *The Unbearable Lightness of Being* or anyone craving something genuinely original. Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner.