Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Award for Best First Book in the Eurasian region and Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award

In a house on a narrow 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.

Painting scenes half-remembered, he flits between past and present, twisting facts to flesh out fiction. Slowly, as the night grows darker, the truth is revealed like a jigsaw falling into place piece by piece: two children who muffle their fears in the blueness of their bedspread; a mother who waves at a stranger across the street as she washes her son; the ghost of a dead baby whose footprints dot the bathroom floor; the muted roar from a cricket stadium.

In prose that is breathless and precise, Raj Kamal Jha discovers love and hope behind the hidden violence and twisted eroticism of an old city. The Blue Bedspread is a profoundly moving story of people who, through their imagination, find the escape they so desperately seek. It is a first novel of extraordinary power and rare humanity.

‘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’—Edward Marriott, Evening Standard

‘Enchanting . . . Jha is not afraid to risk emotion, but he never falls into the trap of sentimentality. That is, in itself, a considerable achievement’—Andrew Biswell, 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 tricky . . . He is a remarkable writer’—Phil Baker, Sunday Times

‘A powerful, haunting and sometimes shocking novel that deserves to be read at one sitting and then re-read’—Cormac Kinsella, Irish Times

‘This is an incantatory, audacious book, notable for great moments of poignancy’—Baret Magarian, Guardian