Ajay and the Mumbai Sun

Varsha Shah's Ajay and the Mumbai Sun is an adventure for 9 year olds about a railway boy in Mumbai who dreams of writing for a newspaper more than anything in the world.

What happens

Ajay is twelve (or thereabouts). He was abandoned on a station platform with nothing but his mother's fountain pen, and his earliest memories are of sleeping under newspapers to keep warm. That's how he learned to read.

Now he sells papers to grumpy commuters. His hero is Mr Gupta, editor of The City Paper. When Ajay finally gets the chance to show him an article, the restaurant owner tears it into tiny pieces in front of everyone. Ouch.

Then two men dump an old printing press in the road. Ajay and his friend Saif, an apprentice engineer, lever it onto a luggage trolley and wheel it back to the station. Yasmin carves a title block. Vinod, the best cook in Mumbai, does the recipes. And The Mumbai Sun is born, printed on bright pink paper! (It was all they could find.)

Their first real story is a big one. Thugs are pinning notices up in the slum, photographing them and ripping them down before anyone can read them. Ajay grabs one. What do you think it says?

Ajay is such good company. He's cheeky, hopeful and very pleased with himself, and he never stays down for long, even when nobody buys a single copy. There are lots of laughs. A businessman is tricked into paying ten rupees for a baldness cure that turns out to be an advert. And there's so much Mumbai in it, from spice sellers to chai poured from a height to cricket in a lamplit courtyard.

It's honest about hard lives, too. Vinod is a Dalit, and his boss hits him and won't let him near the food. Yasmin works in a textile factory, printing T-shirts. Men with metal bars shove an old man to the ground. None of it is graphic, but a thoughtful reader might have questions about why some children have to work. That could be a really good conversation.

If you've got a reader who loves a scrappy underdog with big dreams, this is a brilliant pick.

What to read next

If they're after another brave kid taking on something big in Mumbai, try Thirst. Minni's family shares one tap with the neighbours, and one hot night by the railway tracks she sees water being stolen from the city's pipeline.