Excerpt from A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And something was: another angel, this time above a doorway. Barely discernible through the slow, colourless disappearing act that time and the well-intentioned but wrong kind of preservative varnish had together enforced on it, it still managed, through some inexplicable resurrection, to fix him with its eye. It was like looking into the face of ancient light transmitted back from the beginnings of time.

He took hold of his son's hand to return to the car, moving as fast as having a six-year-old physically attached to him would allow. The larger half of the site remained unvisited; he had had enough. The very air of the place seemed unsettled, as if it had slipped into some avenue where ordinary time and ordinary circumstance did not press against it. Then, with rising anxiety, he knew what was going to happen next, and it did. From the dark inside of a square building, the fox-man came out and stood under the domed canopy of a platform at one corner of the building. He could see the man so clearly, so close, that it was as if all the distance between them across the courtyard had been telescoped into nothing. Then the man retreated into the dark again. He had known the exact sequence of events beforehand, even known the bending of distance that would occur, known that the platform on which the man had stood was called the Astrologer's Seat even though he had not visited that section of the palace quadrangle. He felt himself pursued by the place as they ran out, retracing the route through which they had made their way into and through the palace complex.

While waiting for the car, he dared to look up: the sky was an immense canvas of orange and red, not from the setting sun, it seemed to him, but from the red sandstone that burned, without decaying, under it. Everything was ablaze.

Excerpted from A State of Freedom: A Novel by Neel Mukherjee. Copyright © 2017 Neel Mukherjee. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.