This is a searing debut that goes right to the heart of love, sex and alienation. The past is a cruel country; it never renounces its claim on you. Ritika Ghosh, twenty-two, recently orphaned, and lonely as hell, finds a chance to start his life all over again when he arrives in England to study. But to do that, he must not only relive his entire past but also try to understand it, naming things, making connections, unravelling the thread of a narrative he can only now bring himself to read.

Above all, he must make sense of his relationship with his mother, tender, scarred, abusive and all-consuming. But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritika is looking for and as he loses himself in the big city and takes up residence with the old Anne Cameron, he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of aliens.

Meanwhile, the story that Ritika writes to stave off his utter and complete loneliness, the story of another alien in a foreign country - a Miss Gilby who teaches English, music and Western manners to Bimal, wife of educated zamindar, Nikhils - begins to find ghostly echoes in his life with Anne Cameron. Which one is he making up? And then on yet another night of meat-dealing in the badlands of King's Cross, Ritika runs into Zafar bin Hashmi, suave, impossibly rich, unfathomable, possible arms dealer.

 What does the drive to redemption hold for young, lost Ritika? Set in 1970s and 80s India, 90s England and in the first decade of twentieth-century Bengal, on the eve of the Partition, "Past Continuous" is a book about dislocations and alienations, about outsiders and losers, about the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories and about the consolations of storytelling. It is also a book about the impossibilities of love.