His novel Sacred Games was published in 2006. Sacred Games won the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction, and was included in "Books of the Year," The Independent (UK);

"Books of the Year," Financial Times (UK); "Pick of the Month," January 2007, Booksense (USA); "10 Best Asian Books of 2006," Time (Asia Edition); "Best Fiction of 2006," Guardian (USA); "The Fiction List for 2006," Bloomberg.com (USA); "Notable Books," Sahara Time (India); "Fiction of the Year," Business Standard (India); "Best Books," Man's World (India)

"Roll of Honour," The Financial Express (India).

Chandra has published in the Paris Review and the New Yorker , and in June 1997 was included in the New Yorker 's photograph of "India's leading novelists." His work has been translated into sixteen languages. He has co-written Mission Kashmir , an Indian feature film (starring Sanjay Dutt, Hrithik Roshan, Preity Zinta, and Jackie Shroff). He currently divides his time between Bombay and Berkeley, California, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California.

[ Sacred Games ] is a landmark in the history of Indian English literature. Decades from now, we'll be looking back at the roster of great contemporary novels, and the title Sacred Games will trip off our tongues blithely and reverentially. - Ashok Banker, Hindustan Times .

Sacred Games is a detective story in precisely the same way that Bleak House is a detective story. "All human life is here" was the old newspaper boast, and so it is in Sacred Games , delineated with a master's grandeur and scope and a miniaturist's precision and tenderness. Seven years it took Chandra to write, and such is the haunting precision of its observation and the resonant authority of its narrative voice that one could read it seven times over and still be finding new treasures; missed flourishes of virtuosity.

One uses the terms 'epic' and 'classic' with caution. But if eloquence, confidence, humanity, grace and fine observation are their raw materials, perhaps Sacred Games deserves those epithets. - Jane Shilling, The Daily Telegraph ( UK ) .

...there are times when, reading Sacred Games , you'd swear you were holding the entire teeming city in your hands. It's a novel to get lost in, a novel to make you annoyed at anything that impinges on your time with it, a novel to make you envy those who are just starting it, a novel to remind us of why we read novels...

Sacred Games is a 19th-century novel that breathes the air of now, that gives the lie to those who insist that a fragmented, digital culture can be captured only by a fragmented narrative. "Once the air of this place touches you," says one of the characters about Mumbai, "you are useless for anywhere else." Chandra makes readers useless for novels that offer less than his immense generosity. - Charles Taylor, The Phoenix .

When Midnight's Children first appeared on the scene, it became necessary to reevaluate stories from and about India. With Vikram Chandra's [ Love and Longing in Bombay ]--his second book--it is time to take stock again... Chandra's Bombay is linguistically multiplanar and authentic... breathtaking in the accuracy of its detail. [Chandra does not rely] on the repertoire of received rumours that also infest the city. He does not reproduce old Bombay stories as his own first inventions. He doesn't borrow metaphors, he discovers or invents them. - Farrukh Dhondy, The Observer .

Exceptional ... Chandra, whose second work of fiction [ Love and Longing in Bombay ] is, shows himself to be that rare thing, a writer who is simultaneously a master story-teller and a master stylist... -- Francis King, Spectator.

[Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay ] confirms him as a writer gifted equally with profound compassion and glowing technique... The book is a rainbow of storytelling, beautifully timed, felt, and observed. -- Ruth Padel, Daily Telegraph.

Red Earth and Pouring Rain is above all a novel about the telling of stories. The effect is rich, heady, many-layered and deliberate... Though Chandra's stories are told, they are above all written--and written in an incandescent, evocative, breathtaking style that piles clause upon clause, adjective upon adjective, image upon poetic image until the reader is irresistibly swept along in the flow... And there is myth-making of rare beauty and power... The result is a magnificent tour de force, one of the finest Indian novels of the decade... - Shashi Tharoor, LA Times Book Review.

Setting 18th and 19thcentury Mogul India against the open highways of contemporary America and fusing Indian myth, Hindu gods, magic and mundane reality, [ Red Earth and Pouring Rain ] is a magnificent epic that welds the exfoliating storytelling style of A Thousand and One Nights to modernist fictional technique... Chandra has built a powerful, moving saga that explores colonialism, death and suffering, ephemeral pleasure and the search for the meaning of life... This is an astonishing and brilliant debut. -- Publishers Weekly .