Kankana Basu is a freelance journalist and illustrator based in Mumbai, India. She also illustrates children's books and assists in translating the works of her grandfather, the late Bengali author Saradindu Bandopadhyay. Her collection of short stories titled Vinegar Sunday was published in November 2004. Cappuccino Dusk is her first novel.
Longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2007. Cappuccino Dusk revolves around a quirky, argumentative Bengali family and their friends and relatives in Bombay: their hopes, dreams, death of ideals and the shifting meshwork of relationships between them. It explores the angst and confusion that inevitably come to characterize people living away from their homeland. The characters include a failed novelist, a strident feminist, a glamour-struck teenager, a poetry-spouting collegian, a spinster living more in imagination than reality, an idealistic architect-in-the-making and a brooding artist with a strange affinity with animals. The narrative meanders around fading traditions in the face of advancing globalization, dwelling on the edges where the two processes don't quite meet smoothly. With a generous sprinkling of situational comedy, Cappuccino Dusk is about missed moments, the right things happening at the wrong time, important words left unsaid and those eternal existential questions that no one seems to have answers to. It is also about coffee and conversation
