Boyle set for Slumdog follow-up

Danny Boyle may return to Mumbai - the setting for his Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire - after buying the film rights to the critically acclaimed 2004 book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by the Indian-born author and journalist Suketu Mehta.

The Times is reporting that Boyle (pictured above with Slumdog actor Mohammed Azharuddin) has acquired the rights to the book which the film director called his "bible" while making Slumdog Millionaire in the slums of Mumbai. "I took it with me everywhere", he said last year.

In Maximum City, Mehta, whose family moved to New York in 1977 when he was 14, returns to Mumbai to explore the city's sprawling underbelly. Part travelogue, part autobiography, Mehta delves into the interconnected worlds of Mumbai's criminal underworld, slum-dwellers and hardline political groups.

Salman Rushdie called the nonfiction work, which was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist, "the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis, my city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read".

Boyle hinted at a new project at the Mumbai premiere of Slumdog in January, saying that he would like to make a modern thriller set in India's commercial centre.

Yesterday Suketu Mehta told the Times: "I'm afraid I can't comment on the story yet - officially." There has been no comment from Boyle's agent. ·