The Siege

On the evening of November 26th, 2008, terrorists attacked the city of Mumbai. The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, one of the world’s most luxurious hotels, was the centerpiece of the attack. Its opulence attracted world leaders, athletes, Hollywood and Bollywood royalty, and the upper echelon of Indian society, making it the perfect target. For the next sixty-eight hours, the Taj would be under siege, with hundreds being held hostage as gunmen trolled the hallways and a raging fire began to consume the historic hotel. As the five-year anniversary of this devastating attack nears, Penguin Books is publishing the definitive account in THE SIEGE: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (A Penguin Hardcover Original; On-Sale Date: November 2013; 978-0-14-312375-0; $28.00) by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy.

Set before, during, and immediately after the attack, THE SIEGE unfolds through the experiences of the main players in this real-life drama: the hotel’s GM, who has to take control of the hotel while his wife and sons are trapped on the sixth floor; an American banker and his Indian wife who split up in the hope that one of them will survive; a young receptionist who is trapped alone while her waiter father tried to find her; the Indian police officer who led a small team inside while his superiors dithered. Scott-Clark and Levy also detail the planning of the attack by Lashkar-e-Toiba in Pakistan, how the young men who carried out the plot were discovered and trained, and how they used an American double-agent, David Headley, to gain so much information about the Taj’s layout that the attackers were better informed than the police who were trying to stop them. With 600 guests and 1,600 employees, the Taj Hotel is almost a small village. Indian police and national security were unable to get into the hotel for hours, meaning those in the hotel were left to save each other by organizing escape routes, tending to the wounded, and fighting the terrorists where they could.

Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy have worked in South Asia for sixteen years, and give true insight into the attack and its planning. In addition to interviewing guests, staff, and police, they were given unparalleled access to audio files and transcripts from the wiretaps placed on the gunmen’s phones during the attack, CCTV footage from inside the hotel, and unpublished court documents from the trial of Ajmal Kasab, the only gunman to be taken alive.