Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award Winner of the Best First Book Commonwealth Writers' Award for the Eurasia region 'A ghostly, elliptical piece of prose of quite magical quality, which tells the story of one man's reconciliation with his past . . . It is undeniably powerful' - Evening Standard In a house on a Calcutta street, lit by the half-light of a yellow street lamp, lies a baby, one day old, wrapped in its hospital towel. In the next room sits a man, all alone, writing. Who is this man, at once frightened and determined? What is he writing? Where has the baby come from and where will it go? Tonight, these questions will be answered when the man unravels the dark secrets he has carried all his life . . In The Blue Bedspread Raj Kamal Jha's poetic prose echoes the loneliness of the human condition. 'Enchanting . . . Jha is not afraid to risk emotion, but he never falls into the trap of sentimentality. That is, in itself, a considerable achievement' - Daily Telegraph 'Jha has a real knack for narrative, alternating urgency and delay to the point where his virtuoso handling of the story becomes almost tricksy . . . He is a remarkable writer' - Sunday Times 'A powerful, haunting and sometimes shocking novel that deserves to be read at one sitting and then re-read' - Irish Times 'This is an incantatory, audacious book, notable for great moments of poignancy' - Guardian

In the middle of a steamy Calcutta night the phone rings. An unnamed man in a city of millions answers to a voice telling him that his long-lost sister is dead. He must go to the hospital to identify the body and claim his sister's orphaned newborn daughter until she can be adopted the next day.
During the long hot night, the baby sleeps on a bedspread that used to be indigo blue, but has faded to almost white. As the child lies where the man and his sister used to sleep as children, he quietly writes stories for her, telling of his own childhood full of intensity, anguish, and poetry. He doesn't know his place in the world, but with the help of these stories, the baby someday might.
Raj Kamal Jha's ethereal, poetic prose echoes the loneliness of the human condition.

February 2002. A helpless nation watches as the city of Ahmedabad in India is rocked by religious violence. Before sunrise the next day, more than a hundred Muslim men, women and children will be killed, most of them burnt alive. Above the smoke and flames, the dead decide to intervene. So begins Fireproof, Raj Kamal Jha's mesmerizing new novel, in which the murdered whisper from footnotes and photographs. At the heart of the novel is its narrator Jay - a man who carries with him an unspeakable secret and a newborn baby - and a mystery woman, who writes with her fingers on glass, drawing man and child out of their home and on a journey across the burning city. From the author of The Blue Bedspread and If You Are Afraid of Heights, comes a work of fiction that challenges the way we look at the most twisted events of our times. Evoking both terror and tenderness, Fireproof is a compelling testimony to the ordinary nature of collective evil, and to the extraordinary power of individual conscience.