My Beautiful Shadow

Kayo is a young Tokyo housewife and mother. Outwardly, she is no different from other young mothers, but her secret sets her apart. She belongs to a kind of club, which involves luxury, beautiful clothes and accessories.The club makes it possible for Kayo to escape her tedious life, to become someone else and to embrace a dazzling new world. But it quickly becomes an obsession, a drug, the way to both paradise and hell. Can she find her way out of the dark underworld of debt, lies and prostitution? Or is she doomed to exchange one form of loneliness for another?A deeply absorbing novel about the "holes" that suddenly appear in women's lives, My Beautiful Shadow is a powerful cautionary tale about consumerism gone mad.

"From the pen of a young Indian writer, this is a hypnotic novel about consumerism, and more. It talks about solitude, sex and the role each of us play in society. And it hides all this in a wonderful world of clothes, handbags and high heels." Elle (Italy); "A fascinating book on the seductive (and toxic) power of shopping. Stronger than the pang of conscience we suffer every time we hand our credit card over with a smile to the shop assistant." Marie Claire (Italy); "A first-person tale, intimate and incisive, carefree and disturbing." Femina (France); "[My Beautiful Shadow] is a fascinating and dangerous novel. Very much like display windows, it knows how to attract us to make us fall into its trap." Page (France); "An acerbic critic of the cult of beauty and luxury, the author presents an unexpected portait of Japan that is nothing like we imagined." Lire Supplement (France); "An intimate and incisive, carefree and disturbing first-person tale." Femina (France); "Radhika Jha describes perfectly the lack of self confidence that can lead to robotic and destructive addiction." Telerama (France)

Radhika Jha is an Indian writer (born Delhi 1970) who studied anthropology at Amherst College and did her Master's in Political Science at the University of Chicago. She has worked for Hindustan Times and BusinessWorld, as well as the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, where she started up the Interact project for the education of the children of victims of terrorism in different parts of India. Radhika lived in Tokyo for 6 years, thoroughly immersing herself in all aspects of Japanese culture. She then moved to Beijing followed by Athens with her Ambassador husband and two children. They now live in New York.

A regular contributor to anthologies, such as Delhi Noir (Akashic), Radhika's stories have been published in newspapers and magazines. The story SLEEPERS, part of her short story collection called The Elephant & The Maurti, appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Kayo is a young Tokyo housewife and mother. Outwardly, she is no different from other young mothers, but her secret sets her apart. She belongs to a kind of club, which involves luxury, beautiful clothes and accessories.The club makes it possible for Kayo to escape her tedious life, to become someone else and to embrace a dazzling new world. But it quickly becomes an obsession, a drug, the way to both paradise and hell. Can she find her way out of the dark underworld of debt, lies and prostitution? Or is she doomed to exchange one form of loneliness for another?A deeply absorbing novel about the "holes" that suddenly appear in women's lives, My Beautiful Shadow is a powerful cautionary tale about consumerism gone mad.

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