ThePatient in Bed Number 12

Raj Kamal Jha is Chief Editor of The Indian Express group of newspapers which has won the Vienna-based International Press Institute’s Award for Excellence in Journalism five times. Jha led the newspaper’s team that investigated the Panama Papers with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for which the consortium won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. In 2021, Jha was awarded India’s Editor of the Year by the International Advertising Association for his “bold and exemplary leadership” of a national newsroom during the Covid pandemic. He has twice been a finalist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His most recent novel, The City and the Sea, won Tata Literature Live’s Book of the Year (Fiction), 2019 and the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020

A hate video goes viral. A dying father sets out in search of the living. A daughter risks all to follow her head and heart.

The Patient in Bed Number 12 is a remarkable novel framed as a confession from parent to child, from child to parent. In this profoundly moving exchange, secrets long buried tumble out, mysterious and dreamlike: a grieving mother finds solace in a newspaper photograph; a ghost comes to life in an abandoned fridge; children fill empty jars with the night’s darkness; a young couple plan how to seek permission for their love; and three men with a phone camera turn a family’s world upside down.

Just as one breath holds in its end the beginning of another, each story’s close becomes the opening for the next—linking fragile strands of individual lives into a tapestry of hope and heartbreak. From Raj Kamal Jha, India’s ‘novelist of the newsroom,’ comes a searing investigation of the pulse of today’s India: a billion-plus young people, restless and ambitious, trying to shed the burdens of their past—and yet haunted by ghosts of mistrust and hate.

‘Timely and poignant, The Patient in Bed Number 12 by Raj Kamal Jha takes us on a heart-wrenching journey through the lives of ordinary people during extraordinary times. Jha’s exploration of a father’s final days, a daughter's journey of forgiveness, and the lives they touch along the way, will leave us both shattered and uplifted. A story for our times.’ Nandita Das



‘Tender and elegiac, lyrical but also urgent, this novel is a fiercely imagined and yet remarkably real report on our present moment.’—Amitava Kumar, author of A Time Outside This Time



‘Jha’s narrative unfolds in the chiaroscuro of light and shadow, where every word crackles with drama and metaphor. Its power lies in its ability to strip life down to its raw, essential core.’