New York Times: Rakesfall is Vajra Chandrasekera’s second book after last year’s magnificent “The Saint of Bright Doors,” and is fully as exciting though nowhere near as straightforward. A book in 10 parts, “Rakesfall” shifts wildly in structure and narration. Sometimes an audience watches a television show that is perhaps reality or perhaps a window to something beyond it. Other times different omniscient narrators cede to a play featuring beings who reincarnate over thousands of years. Or a cybernetically enhanced near-immortal wakes from an ancient sleep to solve a murder mystery.
Uniting these threads is a kind of oscillating theme: Souls return over time, sometimes as two people, sometimes four or more, engaged with each other over the thorny question of how to endure fascism and kill kings. The novel’s composition, too, has an element of reincarnation to it: Six of its chapters began life as short stories in various genre periodicals from 2016 to 2021. In an interview, Chandrasekera called the project’s initial phase a “patchwork,” and the finished work is very tongue-in-cheek about the need to “maintain narrative continuity and protect genre boundaries” while careening from life to life and world to world.