Taken from the Biographical Afterword

In this, Joe’s first book, he has already distilled his marvellous range and strides onto the authorial stage fully formed. ‘Drying saris fluttered from balconies like banners ... Whenever the train stopped, men passed by with tea urns shouting chai, chai, and there were cows sleeping on the platform and figures stretched out like corpses with grey sheets.’
 
He is restless, fiercely observant, and we see ‘Small sodden goats huddled in doorways with mouths shaped into smiles and cold yellow eyes ... A beggar woman mewed “Bap, mabap and touched her cracked lips”’. Joe shared his sandwiches; she ‘snatched through the window – I noticed her elegant hands’. And, intrigued, he’s drawn us in.

He is warm, funny, irreverent, unembarrassedly self-revelatory. Discreet and formidably knowledgeable, he has little interest in either dissimilation or false modesty. In conversation and on paper, swooping from one thought to another, he then makes a sharp turn for an historical digression.

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