Sebastian Shakespeare

As The Crow Flies

If You Are Afraid of Heights

By

Picador 294pp £15.99 order from our bookshop

RAJ KAMAL JHA’s second novel is full of riddles. Is the unidentified man who flies over the city on the back of a crow the narrator, the reader or God? Or is he simply a busybody eavesdropping on people’s lives? And, down at street level, nobody knows whether Amir, one of the protagonists, is married, or whether he has a child, because everyone lives cheek by jowl, too close to know who is related to who.

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