Amrit is a reporter for the Sentinel, dispatched to 'the region'—an unnamed and remote part of India—on the vaguest of assignments. Hoping to unearth a story for the front page, he believes he has the perfect starting point: a photograph of a young woman, ostensibly involved in pornography, taken captive by a shadowy insurgent group, and paraded before the press as a lesson to others like her. Yet, following her trail through dead ends and paths that peter out, Amrit soon learns that in the region nothing is quite what it seems.
‘A book every Indian ought to read.’—Hindustan Times‘Deb’s elegant, restrained writing discerns harsh truths about the nation state and the human soul in equal measure.’—Outlook
‘Deb has created his own impressively autonomous world . . . As the title suggests, nothing is as it seems in this book, and Deb brings the shadowy, almost dream-like ‘region’ to vivid life with specific and well-chosen physical details in this confidently imagined, cleverly constructed and finely written novel’—Sunday Times
‘Taut with dramatic tension and teeming with vivid characters, the comparison to Naipaul, Conrad and Graham Greene is, for once, justified, though it is Greene who, with his possibilities of redemption in a bleak world, comes most often to mind.’—Guardian
‘Illusion and delusion, fronts and set-ups are riffs that run through this novel and Amrit's journey into the region turns out to be a metaphor for a remarkable voyage of self-discovery and self-realisation’—Observer |