The Blue Bedspread Book

Raj Kamal Jha's first novel, The Blue Breadspread: A Novel, is a curious, sometimes powerful, work. From the "First Story" to the final "Eight Words", the book is built up meticulously, scene by scene: a man, no longer young, in a house on Main Circular Road, Calcutta, writing to a baby girl sleeping in the next room, waiting for the couple who are coming to take her away. The man's sister, the infant's mother, is dead. Why is he writing? Who is he? What has happened to his sister?: " For years, I have been waiting for news of my sister." The poignancy of her loss and the sudden appearance of her child generate the urge to produce this fable of a family for a child who may never know who she is, where she comes from: "Something you will see or hear will remind you of something missing in your heart, perhaps a hole, the blood rushing through it ... They will then give you these stories." Instead of a family, then, there are stories--the lifeblood of this troubled, and troubling, narrator compelled to deliver the uncomfortable truth of the childhood he has shared with his sister. --Vicky LebeauRead More