The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil

This is a book of ghostly double-lives: two wives, two time periods, two names, twins joined and then separated. The bonds that linger, the losses that haunt us. It’s about the ways in which we can carry a place with us – in the Bollywood films Pinky watches, in the bones of the houses we build, the language we use, the awareness of Durban crumbling. And it’s about the ways we may be trapped betwixt and between – we ourselves are the djinn waiting in the shadows for a hundred years. I never felt firmly grounded in the story – but perhaps that is the point, the sense of witnessing from the periphery, the wavering at the edge.