Thank you to Tordotcom for sending me a copy of The Saint of Bright Doors in exchange for an honest review.
Fetter’s mother raised him to kill. His fate in life is to murder his father, known as the Peaceful and Kind to his cult of followers. After escaping his blood-soaked childhood, Fetter heads to the city where he can get lost. Once in Luriat, however, things are more than they seem. Group therapy is a cover for recruiting revolutionaries, the arrival of gods is heralded via junk mail, and almost-deities lurk around every corner. Then there are the Bright Doors, portals that blow cold wind and make Fetter sick to his stomach. With the arrival of the celebrated Peaceful and Kind imminent, will Fetter embrace his destiny or take the chance to rewrite the world?
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It’s hard to believe that The Saint of Bright Doors is Vajra Chandrasekera’s debut! It’s an intense, deep book about choosing your own destiny in spite of outside forces working against you. As with other advance copies I’ve received this one came with a letter from the author. I truly hope they include it in the final version. Chandrasekera tells of completing his novel in the early months of the pandemic, and states:
“I wasn’t thinking of the all-too imminent future that I could never have predicted, but of decades of Sri Lankan political violence and unrest, and beyond that, the similarly unrestful long weird histories of South Asia that recede into epic but can come snarling back out into the dark. Deep time has long claws; in politics, history is a jump scare.”
I loved having this background knowledge going into The Saint of Bright Doors. It didn’t spoil anything, but still set me up perfectly for the story I was about to experience. The letter adds so much weight to an already hefty novel.
When you start The Saint of Bright Doors, you have to go with the flow. The story opens with Fetter as a child discovering that his mother cut his shadow from him when he was a baby. This isn’t his only oddity; he can also float, and has to dig his toes into the dirt to literally ground himself. This ability isn’t explained, and Fetter is almost instantly thrown into the world as a weapon honed to kill.
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The plot then jumps ahead, and we next meet Fetter in his twenties. He’s as settled as he can be in a city that constantly changes, trying desperately to become his own person in spite of the murderous task he’s been assigned. He assists refugees, goes to group therapy and investigates the mysterious, unopenable Bright Doors scattered throughout Luriat. Chandrasekera doesn’t hold the readers’ hand. Sometimes I felt lost, but in a way that made sense following such an unmoored character.
With The Saint of Bright Doors, Chandrasekera created an entirely new, rich world through immersive, rich prose. Reading his debut was a journey of trust that I truly enjoyed taking, and I can’t wait to see what he writes next. Fans of The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin or The Devourers by Indrapramit Das are sure to enjoy this new novel.
The Saint of Bright Doors comes out on July 11, 2023, and is available for preorder from your local independent bookstore or Bookshop.org.
TW: blood, death, emotional abuse, forced institutionalization, genocide, homophobia, murder, pandemic, police brutality, racism, religious bigotry, war, xenophobia
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