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“We follow Fetter, the child of a god with an unwanted destiny…He lives in the immediately-believable city of Luriat, where ‘bright doors’ are a nuisance: any door left shut for too long may refuse to open again, and become one of the city’s sacred doors. Some keen enthusiasts try to study them, while most people ignore them – one of the many ways in which this invented society feels utterly human and real.” Read more...
“The city of Luriat feels South Asian – Chandrasekera is Sri Lankan – and entirely convincing. The magic woven throughout is beautifully strange. Fetter can see devils of all sorts that other people don’t, clinging to the sides of buildings or shuffling horribly down streets. His father’s Saints have powers of their own – one spends days surveilling the city from the skies, pacing in strange patterns overhead. And of course there are the bright doors: doors that were left closed too long, and now won’t open again. In Luriat, all doors are required to have openings or windows, to prevent them turning into bright doors.” Read more...
“In the novel’s more surreal passages, Chandrasekera achieves the equally-difficult quality of a dreamlike higher reality, that sits beyond the logic of our surface world but doesn’t seem less satisfying for it – rather it seems, somehow, more true. The Saint of Bright Doors is an astonishing debut.” Read more...
New Sci-Fi & Fantasy Novels: The 2024 Nebula Awards Shortlist
