The Saint of Bright Doors

But Vajra Chandrasekera's astonishing Nebula-winning debut is less interested in prophecy than in what happens after you abandon it: Fetter moves to a chaotic, bureaucratic, magic-riddled city and tries, with limited success, to become ordinary, drifting into a therapy group for lapsed messiahs and toward the enigma of the city's sealed 'bright doors.' Surreal, politically charged and formally daring, the novel braids postcolonial history, religious violence and dreamlike invention into something genuinely new.

It resists easy summary and rewards close, patient reading; the pleasures are those of a strange, brilliant mind at play. Critics rightly showered it with awards, and one New York Times reviewer called it the best book she had read all year.