A Life of Adventure and Delight

These beautiful, funny, intelligent short stories are told with such apparent simplicity ... The simplicity is Sharma's effort to get past all the temptations of falsity, of false style and ready-made ideas. His writing shines its clean light, never mercilessly or voyeuristically, on these characters winding round and round inside the muddled opacity of their lives and their thoughts. They, as well as the writer, struggle for the truth ... Yet their vision is comic too, in the broadest, Chekhovian sense: robust and warm and ironic, not overwrought. The genius lies in the detail, in the gritty comical solidity of real things. Tessa Hadley The Guardian