The Blue Bedspread

New York. 2000. April 2000. Random House. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0375503129. 211 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Krista Vossen. Jacket photo by Peter Beavis. keywords: Asia India Literature World Literature. DESCRIPTION - 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 lush prose of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, Jhas spare, straight-forward style has prompted comparisons to the American realism of 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. inventory #34723.…