She Will Build Him a City

An epigraph is a curious tradition, one in which a writer takes lines from the work of another writer and places them squarely at the beginning of his. The purpose the epigraph serves can vary: irony, wit, warning, thematic allusion, tone-setting for the text that follows. Whatever the intent, seldom is it whimsy. Which makes the choice of an excerpt from Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist as the epigraph for the fourth novel by Raj Kamal Jha, weighty.