Early stories from the award-winning author of The Great Indian Novel The Five-Dollar Smile is a collection of stories of young love and disaffection, adolescent high spirits and youthful traumas; there are also stories, written with the energy and passion of youth, which deal with very adult subjects: death, dishonor, deceit, loss, hypocrisy, family, honor, the exacting price of success and the astonishing power of compassion and love. Sensitive, compelling and persuasive, these stories, written for the most part in Shashi Tharoor’s late teens and early twenties, reveal an already formidable talent. Rounding off the collection is a marvelously inventive play set in the time of Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency. The Five-Dollar Smile confirms the praise lavished on Shashi Tharoor all over the world for his writing.