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There are books, and there are quick-reads, as my schoolboys call them. Lavanya Raghunathan Fischer’s first work of fiction definitely belongs to the former category: it has to be read with time on your hand, a fully-charged attention span (no weak battery will process this), and patience to connect the very many dots that flow out of the author’s tropical imagination. No 45 minute skim read is ever going to do justice to this unusual offering, from a ‘lawyer who moonlights as a philosopher’, as the book introduces her.