The Saint of Bright Doors

Fetter was raised by his mother to kill his father. She removed his shadow at birth, trained him in the disciplines of assassination, and taught him that the man who abandoned them, now revered across the region as the Perfect and Kind, must die.

Fetter left instead. He lives in the city of Luriat, attends a support group for other unchosen ones, children raised for prophecies they declined to fulfil, and drifts through a bureaucracy of permits, censuses and religious registration. He can see devils, which almost nobody can do and nobody discusses.

Luriat is full of bright doors: doors that were sealed at some point, that open onto nothing, that people leave offerings at and that the authorities record and monitor. Nobody knows what they are for.

Chandrasekera is writing about a country partitioned by religion and language, where a majority faith has fused with the state, where prisons hold the wrong people and history is rewritten by committee, and readers of Sri Lankan politics will recognise a great deal of it.

His mother is the best character: an unrepentant revolutionary who made a weapon of her son and cannot understand why he objects, and who turns up periodically to point out that he has still not done it.

Around three hundred and sixty pages, allusive, deliberately slow and formally strange, with far more interest in atmosphere and argument than in plot, and a narrator who drifts rather than acts for long stretches.

It will frustrate readers who want the doors explained, because they are not. Best for readers who want political fantasy that refuses every familiar shape, and who like a book that trusts them to sit with it.