India, July 13 -- Dear Reader,

For months I resisted reading Caledonian Road. Never mind the rave reviews, the prizes it was picking up, and that it was plastered over the window displays of all of London's Waterstones bookstores as Book of the Month. Because did I really want to spend 600 pages reading about the angst of a middle-aged intellectual white man?

Despite this, something beckoned- here was a social novel in the tradition of Dickens that looked at the murky money connections between Russian oligarchs and the British aristocracy. Set in London, it dug deep into politics, immigration, street crime and the dark web. With the very human story of Campbell, an art critic, a self-made intellectual who rises from the ranks and then i...