Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

February 2002. A helpless nation watches as the city of Ahmedabad in India is rocked by religious violence. Before sunrise the next day, more than a hundred Muslim men, women and children will be killed, most of them burnt alive. Above the smoke and flames, the dead get together and decide to intervene.
So begins Fireproof, Raj Kamal Jha's new novel, in which the murdered help script the plot, whispering from the footnotes, placing photographs between the lines. At the heart of the novel is its narrator Jay - a man who carries with him an unspeakable secret and a newborn baby - and a mystery woman, who writes with her fingers on glass, drawing man and child out of their home and on a journey across the burning city.
From the author of The Blue Bedspread and If You Are Afraid of Heights, comes a work of fiction that challenges the way we look at the most twisted events of our times. Evoking both terror and tenderness, Fireproof is a testimony to the ordinary nature of collective evil, and to the extraordinary power of individual conscience.

Genres: India, Fiction

352 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2006

About the author

Raj Kamal Jha (Hindi: राज कमल झा; born 1966) is Chief Editor of the daily newspaper The Indian Express and an acclaimed novelist. He lives in Gurgaon.

Jha was born in Bhagalpur, Bihar, and was raised in Calcutta, West Bengal, where he went to school at St. Joseph's College. He then attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, where he got his Bachelor of Technology with Honors in Mechanical Engineering. He was the editor of the campus magazine Alankar in his third (junior) and fourth (senior) years at IIT, where his first writing and editing skills got honed. After graduating from IIT in June 1988, he received a tuition waiver and full scholarship from Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Southern California to pursue a Master's program in Print Journalism; he received his M.A. in 1990.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Nikita Sailesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gripping tale which holds your attention till the very last page, and hits you like a thunderbolt.
In my opinion, the book is about what's ugly and not talked about that openly - and it is this dissonant straightforwardness that really catches you off guard, albeit leaving you with a feeling of having read a truly great work.

[Roland Martinez · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing is excellent but the plot was boring and the twist was out of nowhere and the ending was just arduous.

[Gurpartap Brar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raj Kamal Jha does not disappoint.

[meryem. ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The rest of the baby was a mess. So much so that if all the parts of all the world's babies, black, brown, yellow, white, choose your colour, mix a little bit of this a little bit of that - if all the babies conceived, imagined, all those about-to-be born or born, the half-made, the half-unmade, the aborted, the dead, through the present, the past and the future, down the ages of Baby History, were letters of an alphabet of a Baby Language and each normal baby a sentence making perfect sense, ours would have read: Zd^hrd srty!lks. op*fhT). Maybe shorter, maybe fewer words. But unreadable, nevertheless."

[Bineet]

A superb story written with a master touch..

[Anil Swarup · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is difficult to find words to express the brilliance of this book. The style and narration are unique but bring forth succinctly the "shame" of 2002. The book hits you hard, really hard.

[Santosh Jha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another superb story was written by Mr. Jha. A brilliant and haunting tale of tragedy, grief, and chaos.

[nush]

Got up to page 180, I couldn't go on for my own sanity.