Raj Kamal Jha is Chief Editor of
The Indian Express. The newspaper has won the Vienna-based International Press Institute's India Award for Excellence in Journalism four times. For the newspaper's achievement in investigative journalism, Jha was awarded Journalist of the Year at the Red Ink Awards by the Mumbai Press Club in 2017. He got the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, for his 'journalism and fiction that tell stories of a changing India with honesty and courage.' His fiction has been translated into more than a dozen languages. This is his fifth novel.
In a crumbling neighbourhood in New Delhi, a child waits for a mother to return home from work. And, in parallel, in a snow-swept town in Germany on the Baltic Sea coast a woman, her memory fading, shows up at a deserted hotel. Worlds apart, both embark, in the course of that night, on harrowing journeys through the lost and the missing, the living and the dead, until they meet in an ending that breaks the heart - and holds the promise of putting it back together again.
Called the novelist of the newsroom, Raj Kamal Jha cleaves open India's tragedy of violence against women with a powerful story about our complicity in the culture that supports it. This is a book about masculinity - damaging and toxic and yet enduring and entrenched - that begs the question: What kind of men are our boys growing up to be?
A gripping narrative of human predicament and surviving hope, yielding an extraordinary combination of philosophy and allegory. A book you have to read.Raj Kamal Jha turns his fine lens on the troubled City and the Sea, the depravity and devastation of our times. Reading this is to dive into the darkness and spot a piercing ray of light. Which shows us that as we stumble to find our place in the twenty-first century, the absolute priority has to be the safety of girls in public and private places-and this will need both our courage and compassion.Disturbing and relentless, this fictional afterlife of a rape compels us to confront a culture of masculinity that turns men into brutes. But it also gives us the gift of hope-through one woman's journey to survival, and the collective fight for justice and equality.
The City and the Sea is a story of the children within us, whose only defence against the unexplained horrors of the dark is darkness itself. Each character cuts open our flesh, crushes the yellow-white bare bones of masculinity and proves that it is violence that integrates everything we celebrate as urban. This is a story of hurt souls bred in broken rectangles of homes, set free into the city's sea of blood to gnaw at each other's scars and wounds. Raj Kamal Jha is a terrific storyteller.
