Pacazo by Roy Keysey and Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil: review Segovia is a messy, inconsistent narrator, but through his eyes, Kesey draws intense, beautifully rendered characters and relationships. The grief, the guilt and the rage may lurk, but so do simple pleasures of nonsensical games with his daughter, conversations with his workmates, the awkwardness of unrequited love. It makes for an expansive, occasionally patience-trying, but wholly immersive reading experience - both heart-rending and complex. Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis treads a neater narrative line, but is no less adventurous in its exploration of story and place. This is Old Bombay as seen from the slums and the gutter, the city illuminated in all its sweat and temper, stories lifting from the streets like the smoke from an opium pipe. Centred on Rashid's squalid drug shack, this portmanteau novel picks up strands, weaves them with others, journeys to Mao's China, only to drop us back, mesmerised, right where we began. The literature of drugs can be both wearisome and curiously smug: low-life glamour exulted with florid prose and cod-spiritual awakenings. And while ghosts, visions and trash-can decadence occasionally cloud the atmosphere, Thayil's sympathy, range and clear-eyed, yet fluid style finds something other in the addict's cycle of relief and relapse. Ultimately this is a novel of escape. And while this is hardly a groundbreaking interpretation of narcotic abuse, Thayil subtly inhabits lives destined to forever end back to the pipe: Dimple, a transsexual prostitute; Mr Lee, a Chinese soldier, son of a dissident writer and a communist zealot mother; Rashid, a drug dealer still in thrall to the old ways, wilfully ignorant to the changing society around him. Their sadness, their shattered lives, are depicted with empathy and a sharp eye for the dark comedy that resides there. In ambition, Narcopolis is reminiscent of Roberto Bolano; but it is Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son - the best junkie book of the last quarter century - that is its closer kin. Thankfully, Thayil creates something original and vital from those blueprints. One yearns for the next hit. Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil 304PP, Faber & Faber t £11.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) (RRP £12.99, ebook £7.16) Pacazo by Roy Kesey 544PP, Jonathan Cape t £11.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) (RRP £12.99, ebook £9.31)