Jha, executive editor of the Indian Express
and author of the critically acclaimed novel The Blue Bedspread
, returns with a dark, impressionistic collage about collective history and the unseen connections between people and events. Divided into three nearly discrete stories, the novel follows a set of intertwined characters across a blighted Indian city, in which the poor and the rich live segregated, vastly different lives. Amir, a letter writer for the postal office, meets and falls in love with wealthy Rima after a freak tram accident. A newspaper reporter investigates the death of a young girl in a small town and begins to remember her own childhood trauma. When townspeople start killing themselves, a girl tries to protect her parents from a similar fate. How these stories are connected is not immediately obvious; Jha writes in a style that is at once dramatic and unsentimental, relying heavily on the suspenseful ellipsis of mystery to propel readers forward. "There are a thousand and one reasons in this city for children to cry," Amir says, a statement that echoes throughout the book. Like The Blue Bedspread
, Jha's second novel contemplates incest and domestic violence through the screen of repressed memory, but it is more self-consciously allegorical, and while rich in poetry, it lacks some of the emotional weight of its predecessor. Agent, Gillon Aitken. (Sept.)
