There's the kind of highbrow buzz around the recently published Solo, Rana Dasgupta's second novel, that would warm the heart of any publisher. Readers, too, are excited about the prospect of Dasgupta developing the promise abundant in 2005's acclaimed Tokyo Cancelled. That strange and compelling debut, written in the spirit of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales but set in a generic 21st-century airport transit lounge, was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Chances are that Solo will consolidate Dasgupta's reputation; publishing industry insiders are talking about a 'new Salman Rushdie' and last month, a reviewer on an Australian newspaper tipped it to win the Man Booker Prize.
Four years after his 13 stranded travellers traded their quirky yarns around the baggage reclaim belt, Dasgupta has opted for a more concrete setting. Solo is almost entirely located in Bulgaria.
But why?
'I became fascinated by Bulgaria for a whole number of reasons,' he says. 'It's been a kind of laboratory for many disastrous experiments - monarchies, fascism, communism - and most ended disastrously, particularly in the 20th century, which actually started well for the country with independence in 1908.
'I visited in the mid-1990s when it was experiencing terrible problems economically. And now it has problems with the casino capitalism culture that has emerged in the wake of communism. In a way Bulgaria shows off much of the best and worst of a continent's experience of the 20th century.'