MAPS FOR LOST LOVERS By Nadeem Aslam Faber Price: £6.99 Pages: 384

The clash of Islam and western civilisation, the South Asian diaspora's experience of exile, the gaping void between immigrant parents and their British-born children, the position of women in Islam, the plight of working class England-none of the themes in Nadeem Aslam's second novel Maps for Lost Lovers is particularly new. But the way he tells them just sparkles.

At the start of the book, 65-year-old Shamas stands at his front door just before dawn watching the first snowfall in a fictional northern English town that "lies at the base of the valley like a spoonful of sugar in a bowl". Here winter winds "twist themselves around the body like a sari" and snowflakes melt in the palm of the hand to become "clear wafers of ice ... crystals of snow transformed into a monsoon raindrop". Among the losses in England is that of a season. Barish. The heartbreak of exile is palpable in this filigree of a story spanning 50 years in the lives of three generations of a Pakistani immigrant family.

Inspired by an honour killing that took place 15 years ago in Huddersfield where the author grew up, Maps for Lost Lovers centres around the fall out in a poor immigrant community when Shamas' brother Jugnu and his lover Chanda are believed to have been killed by her brothers for flouting the laws of Islam and "living in sin". From Shamas' despair to his wife Kaukab's fury at having to live in a godforsaken country to Chanda's family's violent reactions, the novel is a critique of extremism and a cry for change from a moderate Muslim point of view. The traditional Kaukab is bewildered by her liberal, communist-leaning husband's views and her lepidopterist brother-in-law who sleeps with white women. She reads the Koran in Arabic without understanding it: "Like bubblegum for the brain," says her son Ujala. But the book is as much a mirror to what is despicable about western civilisation as extremist Islam, and is a wonderful commentary on 50 years of racial issues in Britain. A white child innocently refers to Shamas' part-Caucasian grandson as "half Pakistani and er ... er ... half human".

But this book is more than your average British-Asian venting space. It is also a love song to Britain-the sheer beauty of trees, snowfall, birds, insects. Rife with ghost moths, garden tigers, early thorns, cinnabars, goldfinches, geraniums, rosehips and cherry trees, you will suddenly trip upon things like "blue fish scales, each resembling a boiled sweet sucked down to a sharp sliver between tongue and roof of mouth".

A book after 11 years. Aslam's earlier novel Season of the Rainbirds won the Betty Trask Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award and was long-listed for the Booker. This one has a lot to live up to, and it does. The novel may be a reminder of the "issues" of multicultural Britain, but more than that, it is utter poetry. Move over, Hanif Kureishi.

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Rama Revealed A. RAMACHANDRAN RETROSPECTIVE In two volumes By R. Siva kumar Vadehra Art Gallery Price: Rs 4,250; Pages: 547 At the A. Ramachandran Retrospective at Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art, the artist came in, watched and marvelled, "I really wonder whether I have painted these many." These two volumes explaining Ramachandran's oeuvre will put even his uncertainties to rest. From the fluid strokes of his early sketches-when he wandered from Santiniketan to the villages, carrying a sheaf of papers, a flat pen bought from a Calcutta pavement and a packet of cigarettes to paint the Santhals-to the headless torsos that lay bare the vulnerability of flabby human figures, R. Siva Kumar tells the story of a boy from Kerala who went on to become one of India's finest artists with an idiosyncratic idiom. In this mammoth work you see the shift of concerns-from the macabre Nuclear Ragini series where death squats in colourful ghunghats, to the mythopoeic Tutinama with its fable lands. In place of muscular figures are stereotypical, forlorn female faces. A quiet assurance comes out in Ramachandran's celebrated series on lotus ponds, a culmination of a wild, lyrical engagement with nature. The high point of the journey remains the modern mural of Yayati where the paintings of Ajanta are reinterpreted to create a language of sensuousness. In this explosion of 500 paintings, a medley of styles, if you need a clue, it is, as Ramachandran would say, the lineaments of modernism in an age-old tradition of living. A collector's volume beautifully produced.