“The Saint of Bright Doors” by Vajra Chandrasekera is a #book full of turns and passages and yes, doors.  I had no idea where it would end up.  Fetter is a refugee in a big city who acts as a sort of neighborhood fixer, meeting his lover regularly and relatively satisfied with life.  He is also the son of a goddess who was trained as an assassin to kill his cult leader father from a young age. There are revolutionaries and archaeologists and time slipping and curses and colonialism and refugee camps and multigenerational family drama on an epic, earth shattering scale.  It references Sri Lankan lore and history and has a rich, colorful world.  Definitely a brain twister.

Vajra Chandrasekera: “The hurts that I know, and try to give, and take, [are] on the page. Grief and lost things; atrocity and guilt; bodies and minds damaged by time and broken in twisted histories; love and treason; not mindfulness but bloody-mindedness, you know, ordinary life, but your feet sinking two inches below the surface of the earth. Things that are bittersweet and smoky. Things that feel like a rainy city street at night, lit in yellow. Things that ache between the chakras of the heart and the throat.”

Vajra Chandrasekera (he/him) is a queer second generation writer-editor from Colombo, Sri Lanka.  He has published over 50 short stories and is a recent Nebula award winner. He claims to be a revenant.