About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

ISBN-100151011095

ISBN-139780151011094

eBay Product ID (ePID)30445810

Product Key Features

Book TitleIf You Are Afraid of Heights

Number of Pages304 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2004

TopicGeneral

GenreFiction

AuthorRaj Kamal Jha

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height0 in

Item Weight0.4 Oz

Item Length8.2 in

Item Width5.5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2004-007301

ReviewsJha, executive editor of the Indian Express and author of the critically acclaimed novel The Blue Bedspread, returns with a dark, impressionistic collage about collective history and the unseen connections between people and events. Divided into three nearly discrete stories, the novel follows a set of intertwined characters across a blighted Indian city, in which the poor and the rich live segregated, vastly different lives. Amir, a letter writer for the postal office, meets and falls in love with wealthy Rima after a freak tram accident. A newspaper reporter investigates the death of a young girl in a small town and begins to remember her own childhood trauma. When townspeople start killing themselves, a girl tries to protect her parents from a similar fate. How these stories are connected is not immediately obvious; Jha writes in a style that is at once dramatic and unsentimental, relying heavily on the suspenseful ellipsis of mystery to propel readers forward. "There are a thousand and one reasons in this city for children to cry," Amir says, a statement that echoes throughout the book. Like The Blue Bedspread, Jha's second novel contemplates incest and domestic violence through the screen of repressed memory, but it is more self-consciously allegorical, and while rich in poetry, it lacks some of the emotional weight of its predecessor., Jha's second novel weaves together three seemingly unrelated tales, bound by fragile ties of dreams and memories. A tram accident in an unnamed Indian city brings together a man and woman from totally different circumstances: he lives in a small apartment with cockroaches, water-pump shutoffs, and power outages; she lives in a high-rise aptly called Paradise Park, where the air-conditioning is "like the wind . . . when the monsoon breaks" and windows of telescopic glass offer glimpses of the sea 500 miles away. Both have dreams of a child crying; then she disappears. A reporter visits a small town where a young girl was raped and murdered, her body found in the local canal. She also experiences weird dreams. Finally, a young girl worries about her parents' demise during a spate of neighborhood suicides. In prose replete with poetic imagery, Jha keeps his readers on the edge, never sure of what is real and what is magic, of what is happening now and what is memory., PRAISE FOR IF YOU ARE AFRAID OF HEIGHTS "What we come to see, page by page, are the many synchronicities, concurrences and happenstance situations that imbue these interlocking vignettes with a profound and moving sense of the magical."-- The San Diego Union-Tribune "From the author of the devastating The Blue Bedspread comes another stunning, multilevel novel of human suffering and uneasy hope . . . Read this one soonest. Undoubtedly one of the best of the year."-- AsianWeek, PRAISE FOR THE BLUE BEDSPREAD "The Blue Bedspread can be read easily in one sitting. But its images and emotions will linger long after the surprise ending." -USA Today "A spare, mysterious tale of erotic violence and illicit love that stays in the mind long after the last page has been turned." -The New York Times

Dewey Edition22

Dewey Decimal823.914

SynopsisA 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.

LC Classification NumberPR9499.3.J49I35 2004