The Patient in Bed Number 12 By Raj Kamal Jha

A hate video goes viral. A dying father sets out in search of the living. A daughter risks all to follow her head and heart.

The Patient in Bed Number 12 is a remarkable novel framed as a confession from parent to child, from child to parent. In this profoundly moving exchange, secrets long buried tumble out, mysterious and dreamlike: a grieving mother finds solace in a newspaper photograph; a ghost comes to life in an abandoned fridge; children fill empty jars with the night’s darkness; a young couple plan how to seek permission for their love; and three men with a phone camera turn a family’s world upside down.

Just as one breath holds in its end the beginning of another, each story’s close becomes the opening for the next—linking fragile strands of individual lives into a tapestry of hope and heartbreak. From Raj Kamal Jha, India’s ‘novelist of the newsroom,’ comes a searing investigation of the pulse of today’s India: a billion-plus young people, restless and ambitious, trying to shed the burdens of their past—and yet haunted by ghosts of mistrust and hate.

About The Author

Raj Kamal Jha is Chief Editor of The Indian Express group of newspapers which has won the Vienna-based International Press Institute’s Award for Excellence in Journalism five times. Jha led the newspaper’s team that investigated the Panama Papers with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for which the consortium won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. In 2021, Jha was awarded India’s Editor of the Year by the International Advertising Association for his “bold and exemplary leadership” of a national newsroom during the Covid pandemic. He has twice been a finalist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His most recent novel, The City and the Sea, won Tata Literature Live’s Book of the Year (Fiction), 2019 and the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2020.

The official release for the book is in November 2023.