The Saint of Bright Doors

Genre

Fantasy & Magical Realism

Publisher

Tordotcom (Macmillan)

Publication year

2023

ISBN

9781250847386

Fetter was raised by his mother to assassinate his messianic father, and grows up shadowless, able to see invisible devils. In a teeming, magical city, he drifts into a support group for other 'chosen ones' and toward the mystery of the city's sealed 'bright doors.' Vajra Chandrasekera's debut...

Fetter was born to be a chosen one - trained from childhood by his mother to murder his cult-leader father, severed from his own shadow, gifted with the sight of unseen devils. 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. For adventurous readers who want fantasy that breaks its own molds, it is a remarkable, unclassifiable achievement.