Timely and poignant, The Patient in Bed Number 12 by Raj Kamal Jha takes us on a heart-wrenching journey through the lives of ordinary people during extraordinary times. Jha’s exploration of a father’s final days, a daughter's journey of forgiveness, and the lives they touch along the way, will leave us both shattered and uplifted. A story for our times. -- Nandita Das

Tender and elegiac, lyrical but also urgent, this novel is a fiercely imagined and yet remarkably real report on our present moment. -- Amitava Kumar

Raj Kamal Jha’s new novel reminds us what a remarkable writer he is. He has created an artefact out of “odds and ends” in which nothing-epigraph, dedication, the first and last lines of chapters, photos through which you exit and enter the text-is redundant. The pandemic runs through the various stories here. So does a purpose Jha never loses sight of: to show us anew what the novel, as a form, can do. -- Amit Chaudhuri

Jha’s narrative unfolds in the chiaroscuro of light and shadow, where every word crackles with drama and metaphor. Its power lies in its ability to strip life down to its raw, essential core. -- Namita Gokhale

Literally an experimental novel, The Patient in Bed Number 12 may be termed “prosetry” in which the prose ebbs and flows in poetic rhythm, rising up and falling down, drowning us, gushing along the walls and over the ceilings of the structures we call homes, floating us and whirling us in frenzied lock step with our country, merging brain-storming politics with soul-stirring fiction. Telescopic, microscopic and kaleidoscopic, the novel offers a view of the fragments of our Indian experience that have defined us down the ages, through the lives of a father and his daughter, during the time of a pandemic, which infects not our bodies but souls so much so that, it has started hurting our own loved ones and shatter them into a million pieces. Jha creates a new normal of exemplary literary talent. -- K.R. Meera

Raj Kamal Jha’s fiction evokes, unforgettably and inimitably, the complex and singular fate of being Indian today. In The Patient in Bed Number 12, he brilliantly illuminates yet again the impossible contradictions, the mammoth paradoxes and heartbreaking poignancies of our unprecedented situation. -- Pankaj Mishra

Raj Kamal Jha is Chief Editor of The Indian Express group of newspapers which has won the Vienna-based International Press Institute’s Award for Excellence in Journalism five times. Jha led the newspaper’s team that investigated the Panama Papers with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for which the consortium won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. In 2021, Jha was awarded India’s Editor of the Year by the International Advertising Association for his “bold and exemplary leadership” of a national newsroom during the Covid pandemic. He has twice been a finalist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His most recent novel, The City and the Sea, won Tata Literature Live’s Book of the Year (Fiction), 2019 and the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020