"Acclaimed writer Gupta ... creates a tale as sumptuous as a tropical jungle with its dark mysteries and ripe undercurrents of lust and danger."

Sunetra Gupta's work is genuinely challenging, rare and enriching... The creator of a prose which is capable of the subtlest artistic resonance, she deserves the depth of response we accord to the very best of writers.

– Amit Chaudhuri

"American travel writer Max Gate returns to the lavish Bengal seaside house of his old friend Byron Mallick on the eve of a funeral, in Gupta's languid rumination on love and opportunities lost, her first novel since 'A Sin of Color'... shifting fluidly from the present to various events in Max's past... Gupta's nonlinear plot is as twisted as the relationships between her characters, and while the pacing sometimes drags, the landscapes dazzle."

Professor and novelist Gupta's latest work... is a poetic journey of discovery. Each page slowly and elegantly reveals the history leading up to American travel writer Max Gate's return to Bengal, India, where he attends a funeral and reunites with old acquaintances... Reminiscent of the movie Memento, minus the amnesia, this novel requires readers to fit together the pieces of the past and present to discover the bigger picture behind Gupta's story, her characters, their pseudoaristocratic lifestyles in both London and India, and their relationships with one another. ...this is an effortless read.

Sunetra Gupta writes of ambiguities brilliantly. Her language swoops from evocative reconstruction of memories and landscapes to sharply focused depictions of social encounters. She is as much at ease describing the seashore and gardens of Bengal or the streets of Kolkata as she is describing Christmas in a country house in Ireland. She also layers events so they reflect on one another. ...Max's nostalgia fuels this novel. He looks back to his past, when he was more hopeful, more innocent, more capable of infatuation, admiration and love. Doors opened for him. At the end of the novel, doors are closing, the mood is sad as Sunetra Gupta's meditation on loss and evil draws to a close. Long after the last page has been conned and the book set aside, readers will continue to reflect on this meditative and often fascinating work.

A lucid and mesmerizing masterpiece... This is an exquisite, mournful novel that focuses on the intersection of memory and reality to reveal how, and how often, we deceive ourselves.

Although a decade has passed since Sunetra Gupta's last novel, this lucid and mesmerizing masterpiece shows she has used every minute of that time wisely. Gupta uses a disjointed narrative to mimic the random recall of memory, something she accomplishes with superb skill and manifests through highly stylized, minimalist prose and distilled pieces of dialogue. ...rich and evocative...lush...a full and textured tapestry...an exquisite, mournful novel...

Basking in the language of this book is like having honey poured over you. But Gupta can also deliver a blow that keeps her narrative from veering into the overwritten. There is a disquieting intensity beneath the novel's calm surface, just as Max's love for Ela and his attempts to escape from it-'I cannot spend what is left of life to me in perennial heartache'-throb beneath everything else he does, including his attempts to ascertain Mallick's guilt or innocence.