If You Are Afraid of Heights
by Raj Kamal Jha
Picador $105
Strange, atmospheric writing that's hard to categorise. Three stories are woven together. A man and woman meet in a midnight road accident in Calcutta and fall in love. A journalist arrives in a small town in Bengal to cover the story of a child who has been raped and thrown into a canal. A young girl is upset by a series of suicides in her neighbourhood and she confides in her only friend - a crow who flies over the city. Jha's multi-layered prose takes the reader into a world where fantasy and reality blur. He asks: Who are we, really? Are we who we think we are or are we someone else, someone hidden from ourselves? At times, the fragmented story seems to be going nowhere. But Jha draws connections between the different elements, showing that this book is carefully structured.
