She Will Build Him a City

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

Dont 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 *
Jhas 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 husbands pupils to the more surreal tableau of Orphan * Guardian *
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 *

Author Bio

Raj Kamal Jha is Chief Editor of The Indian Express which has won the International Press Institutes India Award for Excellence in Journalism three times. His novels include The Blue Bedspread, winner of the 2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia) and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; If You Are Afraid of Heights, a finalist for the Hutch-Crossword Book Award in 2003; and Fireproof, rated first in CNNIBNs list of best books published in India in 2006. His novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Raj works in New Delhi and lives in Gurgaon.