The Siege

In late November 2008, four gunmen walked into the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai and seized it. Over the next three days the building burned while the world watched on television. The Siege, by investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, reconstructs the attack from inside the hotel, following what happened to the people who were trapped there and those who tried to reach them.

The account draws on the experiences of guests, hotel staff, police officers and commandos of the National Security Guard. It also uses transcripts of the calls between the attackers and their handlers, which let the reader hear how the assault was directed as it unfolded. Among the people we meet are a couple on the eve of their wedding, a British-Cypriot shipping magnate whose luxury yacht was moored in front of the hotel, and a young Taj employee who lived because a stranger telephoned at the right moment.

Beyond the hour-by-hour story of the siege, the book looks at how the attackers were trained, how David Headley played both sides, and how badly the Indian security forces handled the response. It is a tense, reported narrative that is as much about human endurance as about the failures that let the attack happen.