If You Are Afraid of Heights

A man and a woman meet in a midnight road accident and fall in love. A reporter arrives in a small town to uncover the story of a child's rape and murder. A young girl, shaken by suicides in her neighborhood, begins to fear for her parents' lives. These three tales, written by the author of the debut sensation The Blue Bedspread, come together in the looking-glass world of this magical novel, where nothing is quite what it seems, yet all is strangely familiar. Drawing the reader deep into the uncharted zone between fantasy and reality and following the neglected souls of a vast country, If You Are Afraid of Heights is a breathtaking odyssey across the landscape of a changing urban India.

Literature & Fiction

Jha, Raj Kamal

Literary

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

The Blue Bedspread

In the middle of a steamy Calcutta night the phone rings. An unnamed man in a city of millions answers to a voice telling him that his long-lost sister is dead. He must go to the hospital to identify the body and claim his sister's orphaned newborn daughter until she can be adopted the next day. During the long hot night, the baby sleeps on a bedspread that used to be indigo blue, but has faded to almost white. As the child lies where the man and his sister used to sleep as children, he quietly writes stories for her, telling of his own childhood full of intensity, anguish, and poetry. He doesn't know his place in the world, but with the help of these stories, the baby someday might. Raj Kamal Jha's ethereal, poetic prose echoes the loneliness of the human condition.

United States

Harper-perennial

Look at the picture on the cover, there's a child, a girl in a red dress; there's a bird, a crow in a blue white sky. And then there are a few things you cannot see. -f r o m If You Are Afraid of Heights But the crow sees everything: In Part One, a man and a woman meet in a midnight road accident and fall in love. In Part Two, a reporter arrives in a small town to uncover the story of a child's rape and murder. In Part Three, a young girl, shaken by suicides in her neighborhood, begins to fear for her parents' lives. And the lives of all of these characters overlap and intersect in a magical realm that lies somewhere between fantasy and reality. Ultimately, multiple coincidences and recurring motifs pull the parts together and reveal the ways in which all three tales are both their own stories and the many sides of one story.

If You Are Afraid Of Heights

World Literature

Mariner Books

Physical description; 228p. ; 22cm. Subjects; Family - India - Fiction. Urban poor - India - Fiction. Indic fiction (English) - 21st century.

The blue bedspread

Picador

Written in the author's exquisitely crafted and beautiful, precise prose, this book offers a glimpse into a looking-glass world where nothing is quite what it seems and yet everything is strangely familiar. A man and a woman meet in a midnight road accident and fall in love.   A reporter arrives in a small town to uncover the story of a child's rape and murder. A young girl, shaken by a series of suicides in her neighborhood, worries for her parents' safety. Three seemingly separate stories, and yet interwoven themes and recurring motifs suggest a connection between the strands: a crow flying overhead, a skyscraper larger than any built before, a dog missing part of its tail, a news report… a girl in a red dress.   A novel that defies categorization, this book is about abuse, neglect, and the silence of secrets, but also about the power and possibilities of hope. The result is a breathtaking odyssey into the uncharted zone between fantasy and reality, a journey into worlds that might have been - or might yet be, perhaps…

Genre Fiction

MACMILLAN PUB. LTD.

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

Fireproof

Pan/Macmillan

February 2002. A helpless nation watches as the city of Ahmedabad in India is rocked by religious violence. In the aftermath and before the sun rises, more than 100 Muslim men, women, and children are killed, most burned alive. Above the smoke and flames, the dead begin to intervene. So begins Raj Kamal Jha’s mesmerizing new novel, in which the murdered whisper from footnotes and photographs. At the heart of the novel is its narrator Jay, a man who carries with him an unspeakable secret and a newborn baby, and a mystery woman who writes with her fingers on glass, drawing man and child out of their home and on a journey across the burning city. A work of fiction that challenges the way we look at the most twisted events of our times and evoking both terror and tenderness, Fireproof is a compelling testimony to the ordinary nature of collective evil, and to the extraordinary power of individual conscience.

A midnight phone call awakens a man to inform him that his sister has died in childbirth. He is told he must keep the orphaned baby girl overnight, until her new, adopting parents can collect her. Over the course of that hot night in Calcutta, the man hurriedly writes stories to the baby sleeping on a blue bedspread in the next room: stories of the family she was born into, stories of the mother she will never know. Painting half-remembered scenes, he flits between past and present, recounting tales of the shared childhood of a boy and his sister who muffled their fears in the blueness of that very same bedspread. As the hours pass, the man gradually divulges a layered and transfixing confession of the darkest of family secrets. Described by John Fowles as "remarkable, almost a coming-of-age of the Indian novel," this powerful, penetrating debut by a young New Delhi journalist has already been recognized as an international literary event. In prose that is breathtaking and precise, Raj Kamal Jha discovers the hidden violence and twisted eroticism of an exotic, overcrowded old city. Unlike the India captured in the exotic prose of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, Jha writes in a spare, straightforward style that has prompted comparisons to American realists like Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo. The Blue Bedspread is a searingly honest story about the love and hope that can survive in the midst of family violence. It is a first novel of extraordinary power and humanity.

Random House]

“All that counts is you, my little child, and all that I want right now is a little silence, so that you can sleep undisturbed and that I can finish these stories. And once you have grown to a beautiful woman, you will pause for a moment and ask yourself: “Who am I? Then you will read these stories.”„Alles, was jetzt noch zaehlt, bist du, mein kleines Kind, und alles, was ich in diesem Moment will, ist ein wenig Stille, damit du ungestoert schlafen kannst und ich diese Geschichten zu Ende bringe. Und wenn du zu einer schoenen Frau herangewachsen sein wirst, dann wirst du eines Tages innehalten, ploetzlich. Ein Bild, ein Geraeusch wird dich an etwas erinnern, das in deinem Herzen fehlt, und du wirst dich fragen: ‚Wer bin ich?‘ Dann werden sie dir diese Geschichten geben.“

Das blaue Tuch (German Edition)

Contemporary

New Media German Language

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jha, Raj Kamal. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jha, Raj Kamal

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jha, Raj Kamal. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

If You Are Afraid of Heights

The Blue Bedspread

If You Are Afraid Of Heights

The blue bedspread

If You Are Afraid Of Heights

If You Are Afraid of Heights

Fireproof

Fireproof

The Blue Bedspread

Das blaue Tuch (German Edition)