This frst novel from Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandrasekera is the most exciting fantasy I have read in a long time. It's set in a weird version of contemporary south Asia, much about the power of cult leaders and other Asian themes. Unlike anything I have ever read before, and not just because of the setting. It is wildly inventive and sometimes quite strange, but it always hangs together.
Camps of various kinds loom large: refugee camps, internment camps, quarantine camps, prison camps, some so large the residents of the remoter districts have forgotten that they are interned. In big parts of the world such camps are a major feature part of life, and of how people imagine their reality.
On the other hand, it plays with the variant timeline theme that dominates contemporary science fiction and fantasy; there are some themes you can's escape from even in Sri Lanka.
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