David Davidar meets me in Penguin’s book-lined reception area. He is tall, casually dressed and soft-spoken, with the easy, confident grace of a man entirely comfortable in his world. His second novel, The Solitude of Emperors, out in early September, is the story of a young Tamil who gets caught up in violent, religion-inspired riots. The word is that it’s destined for best-seller lists in nearly a dozen countries before the end of this year, which won’t be a surprise, considering his first book, The House of Blue Mangoes, was a success in 16 languages. Then, as now, he had a day job running a publishing house; only his location has changed. He used to be the president and publisher at Penguin India, in Delhi; now he is the president and publisher of Penguin Canada, located on the seventh floor of a drab low-rise near Yonge and Eglinton.

“My whole life,” he says with a smile, “I’ve moved in a bubble, surrounded by writers and editors. It doesn’t matter to me what city or country I live in.” From inside his bubble, he notices little difference between the loud, humid density of the Mumbai he describes in his new novel and the cold, arid streets of Toronto in winter. While his wife of 10 years, Rachna Singh—who works at the newly opened Ben McNally Books—escapes to India during the frozen months, Davidar stays. (He calls her his most discerning and least forgiving critic.)

His upbringing prepared him for a life full of books. He was born in 1958 in a small town on the southern tip of India, in the state of Tamil Nadu. His father, Eddy, was the first Indian executive of a British tea company, his mother, Sushila, a schoolteacher. During holidays, Davidar visited his grandfather, a headmaster who brought home selections from his school’s library for his bookworm grandson. Davidar read so quickly—devouring in a few days a supply meant to last a week—that his grandfather quizzed him to make sure he’d actually read the books. He was educated at Madras Christian College (“I still go to church once a year to hear the singing”), then worked as an editor at the Esquire-like Gentleman magazine in Mumbai (the main character in his new book also works at a magazine in that city) before gaining admission to the famed Radcliffe-Harvard publishing course in Boston in 1985. (“I was bored with my job,” Davidar says. “That’s been a driving force in my life: boredom with my present situation.”)