Debut novel depicting poverty in modern day India. According to Andrew Holgate in the Sunday Times 'the Indian tourist board won't be pleased,'

From her bed in a crumbling Irish mental hospital, a 99-year-old woman (sister-in-law to Eneas McNulty from an earlier novel by the same author) writes a "brittle and honest-minded history of myself".

A self-conscious girl, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, becomes fascinated by her uncle, a reviled slum landlord, in 1970s London.

Professor John Sutherland, a judge in 1999 and 2005, said that: 'if The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.'

Has been compared to A Confederacy of Dunces.