For ten-year-old Ori, his mother’s life as a theatre actor holds as much fascination as it does fear. Approaching adolescence in an unstable home, he is haunted by her nightly stage appearances, and the suspicion and resentment her profession evokes in people around her, at home and among their neighbours. Increasingly consumed by an obsessive hatred of the stage, Ori is irrevocably drawn into a pattern of behaviour that can only have catastrophic ...
A brilliant debut novel in which personal histories crisscross to delineate the social history of a city.A retired schoolteacher in present day Calcutta is caught in the labyrinth of rusty bureaucracy and political crime under a communist government. Across a vast ocean of time, a widow leads a life of stark suffering in a wealthy feudal household in 19th century, British-ruled Bengal, at a time when widow burning has gone out of practice but widow remarriage is ...