The Angel Collector
by Bali Rai
Sophie goes missing at a festival and her on-off boyfriend Jit, remains committed to finding her. Piecing together tenuous leads, he finds himself on the track of a potentially racist cult. Alongside this we read texts sent between Sophie and Jit, which suggest a psychological complexity to their largely shadowy characters. In a third strand, we glimpse the sick behaviour of the serial abductor at the heart of the story. This is a thriller suffused with an air of menace, of insecurity, of complex personal tensions and violence, and there is something morally unsettling about the lurid and titillating aspects of the writing. While the finger points ultimately at the psychologically warped murderer, there is a sense that many of the characters, not least Jit himself, are in some way implicated.
Publisher: Corgi
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Bali Rai
Bali Rai was born in 1971 and raised as a working class Punjabi in Leicester. He grew up in a deprived area of Leicester, a city which is almost unique in terms of cultural mix and his style of writing is firmly grounded in the reality that he has seen around him since he was a child. The senior school he attended was about 80% ethnic - 20% white children in terms of ethnic mix.
Bali Rai has been writing short stories and poetry since the age of eight. As a child he made up wild and exciting stories and his imagination has been vivid ever since. At school he excelled at English language and told his teachers that he would one day be a writer.
He left school with eight GCSE’s and English was always his favourite subject. After school he did three a-levels at a local sixth form - none of which was English Literature, which he now regrets. He went on to graduate from Southbank University in London with a 2:1 in politics and since then he has had various jobs in retail, cinema, and telesales and has kept a keen, almost obsessive, interest in current affairs.
Bali Rai
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Reading Age: 13+
Interest level: 13+
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