She Will Build Him A City - Softcover

Don't let the lucid, lyrical grace of the prose fool you - this is a blistering, enthralling, bareknuckle ride of a novel. Its revelations about the "New India" are explosive * Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others * The best novel from and about India that I have read in a long time * Pankaj Mishra * Violence, tenderness, poverty, mobility: in short, a portrait of the New India * Jeet Thayil * She Will Build Him a City sets interwoven stories of violence, sex and longing in a vibrant Delhi * Irish Times Ones to Watch 2015 * When reality becomes too difficult to bear, then stories find other ways to come out, telling themselves in language positioned at a jaunty angle to the material facts. This, it would appear, is the case in the fourth novel by Raj Kamal Jha ... Jha's mode of conveying his stories is consistently tantalising: individual tales overlap, bouncing us from the first-person confidences of a widow estranged from her daughter because of her relationship with one of her late husband's pupils to the more surreal tableau of Orphan ... The sense throughout is one of inescapable oppression * Guardian *

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURE As night falls in Delhi a mother spins tales from her past for her sleeping daughter. Her now grown-up child is a puzzle with a million pieces whom she hopes, through her words and her love, to somehow make whole again. Meanwhile, as the last train from Rajiv Chowk Station pulls away, a young man rides the metro and dreams of murder. In another corner of the city, a newborn wrapped in a blood-red towel lies on the steps of an orphanage as his mother walks away. There are twenty million bodies in this city and this woman, man and child are only three. But their stories - of a secret love that blossoms in the shadows of grief, of a corrosive guilt that taints the soul, and of an orphaned boy who maps out his own destiny - weave in and out of the lives of those around them to form a dazzling kaleidoscope of a novel. Beautiful, beguiling and audacious, this is the story of a city and its people, of love and horror, of belonging and forgiveness: a powerful and unforgettable tale of modern India.