The Five Dollar Smile is a collection of stories of young love and disaffection, adolescent high spirits and youthful traumas there are also stories, written with the energy and passion of youth, which deal with very adult subjects death, deceit, loss, hypocrisy, honour. Sensitive, compelling and persuasive, these stories, written for the most part in Shashi Tharoor's late teens and early twenties, reveal an already formidable talent. Rounding off the collection is a marvellously inventive play set in the time of the Emergency.
