The Girl is unabashedly sentimental. The heartscape of the two central characters is subject enough for the author, which is refreshing given the almost obligatory political/social commentary in Indian English fiction these days. Launching right away into The Girl's funeral in Goa, the narrator hides behind bushes in a cemetery, describing the scene in saturatedly poetic prose. Rife with wildly extended metaphors and a curious, if slightly forced, "air of mystery", you will probably lose interest in How-The-Girl-Came-To-Be-Dead (the ostensible plot), your attention shifting instead to the real treat of this book: the dazzling and often strangely dark visual imagery.

Much of the scene is set in Azul, Village of the Dead, "the fishing village no one has ever heard of because none of its residents ever leaves". The plot thickens with help from excerpts from the dead girl's diary in which the ghost of her mother, her ageing grandparents' sad and lonely deaths and her lover's betrayal provides the maudlin background for her eventual suicide. But despite all the fanciful literary devices, what really engages here is the gloomy, monsoon-drenched richness in the descriptions of Goa, its Portuguese Catholic ethos, and most of all, the turns of phrase: "My mango sticky fingers attract flies that crawl greedily across my hands and I am so steaming-melting-treacle-pudding-sizzling I cannot lift myself to bid them farewell." Elsewhere, a ditch floats with green scum, "hairy with disease," a much adored, perspiring lover is "a garland of fragrances few would have the courage to wear," there is a "steaming yellow sun" and "glowing pink bougainvillae".

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Though it may seem sentimentally overblown, The Girl works because it is above all, a candid expression of a universally tortuous human experience-lopsided love. "I had given my heart so freely that I could have been an infant throwing my stuffed yellow duck at a stranger who passed my window," says The Girl. Luke, her American lover with "thighs muscled with a lifetime of swift escapes", has left, and gone is the contentment of the "wash basin full of twos-two plates, two water glasses... two shiny silver forks". Luke's love for The Girl was a "souvenir from an exotic holiday", but for her, it was everything. While Luke was "rutting his way across East Asia", The Girl was drowning in the realisation that she would never escape him. "You can run through continents and hide in small towns... but one day you can smell a smell that will knock you over with longing. Honeycomb, and Gold Flake cigarettes and Fa Fresh deodorant... No matter what, some people, like some smells, will always find you." The Girl is a slip of a book, just over a hundred pages long, no more than one evening's read and in the tradition of Elizabeth Smart's cult classic By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, it makes romantic suffering something of epic proportions. A good, swift journey for those who care to venture back to that painful place (left behind in adolescence by most practical people) where one can actually die from too much love.