Samar, a naive young man of nearly 20 and a candidate for civil service, is mostly engrossed in a book. In the classics of European literature, he seeks the meaning of his life. Then, in Benares, the holy city on the banks of the Ganges, he encounters two women who stir his emotions: one, Miss West, introduces him to a group of European dropouts searching for a kind of exotic truth in India, while the other, Catherine, opens him up to love and misfortune. Pankaj Mishra's successful novel "The Romantics" is the drama of self-discovery and at the same time a multifaceted portrait of modern India. Sensual and atmospheric, in the tradition of E. M. Forster and V. S. Naipaul, the author narrates the illusory romance between East and West.