RAJ KAMAL JHA

From the author of The Blue Bedspread, a wonderful new novel about family, fantasy and love. Amir, Mala and their daughter are normal people. Amir goes to his office; Mala reads the newspaper; their young daughter plays alone. But Jha has not chosen to tell a tale of everyday life in Calcutta. Instead he looks inwards at the elaborate stories that people tells themselves. In the looking-glass world of the novel, nothing is quite what it seems. And yet, at the same time, it is all very familiar. If You Are Afraid of Heights is about the private journeys that people go on in their minds; about imaginations fuelled by the images and narratives of a city.

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.

Juego nocturno es la primera novela de Raj Kamal Jha, un joven escritor indio cuyo manuscrito sorprendió en la Feria de Frankfurt del pasado año a muchos editores literarios del mundo entero, quienes, al igual nosotros, embargados por su madurez formal, su estilo depurado y poetico, y por la intensidad y originalidad del relato, se apresuraron a leerlo y contratarlo. En la casa de una estrecha y oscura calle de Calcuta yace un recien nacido, sobre una colcha azul. En una habitacion contigua, un hombre escribe ajeno a todo y a todos, horas despues de haber recibido la llamada de la policia: su hermana, a la que no ve hace tiempo, acaba de morir en el hospital; embarazada de una niña, los medicos han logrado que esta sobreviva. Ahora, en el asfixiante calor de la noche, el protagonista comienza a urdir historias para calmar el llanto de la niña, historias sobre la cruel, callada y en cierto modo misteriosa existencia de las mujeres en una gran ciudad caotica y convulsa, que devora a sus habitantes. Tambien le contara los momentos en que conocio el amor y fue feliz. Y sobre todo, volvera con obstinacion a la habitacion que compartio con su hermana en la adolescencia, cuando ambos se extasiaban ante un falso cielo de estrellas proyectadas sobre una inmensa colcha azul, en la que tambien anidaban todos sus secretos. . . Lejos del exotismo que el lector podria suponer, Juego nocturno, aun anclando sus raices en la antigua tradicion india del contador de historias, se inscribe directamente dentro de la mas refinada literatura universal contemporanea.