Himaliketo, Thank you for the review on "Royal Ghosts". It's disheartening for me to know that the "problems" I had with reading Mr. Upadhyay's first novel seem to remain in this installment as well. I had hoped that he would move away from the Kathmnadu centric vision that was so apparent in "Arresting God in Kathmandu". One point of disagreement with your review however is when you say "One of the characters in each story talks about Indian things some character talks about Amitab bachhan or manisha Koirala or Dilip Kumar or even Indian food. Why each of one character is joining with Indian stuff..? That’s I did not like…That does not represent the creative writing…that represents the writer himself or his ness" I think we need to keep in mind that Nepali society--whether we like it or not is heavily influenced by Indian popular culture-i.e. Bollywood. It is not a figment of Mr. Upadhyay's imagination when his characters seem pre-occupied with characters of Bollywood or reference to Indian food because we are all well aware, Bollywood makes a lot of money in Nepal and as mentioned earlier, Indian culture/food etc is a huge part of the "shared" cultural aspects of Nepal and India. Therefore, I personally, cannot hold a grudge against Mr.Upadhyay on that front. ******************************************************************** Sheetalb, I haven't read the book yet so I was wondering what you meant by "the stories were a lot simpler" - Do you mean that the level of sophistication of writing was not to the level of your expectation or that the stories are not well developed? If that is the case, again, more dissappointment there, because I was actually looking forward to being proved wrong in my earlier rather nasty post on Mr. Upadhyay's writing in "Arresting God in Kathmandu". I do intend to read the book even though the expectations in light of the two posts has come down several nothces.