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misfortune because, as they said back in her country, “Celebrate the bad times for they won’t remain bad forever, be wary of the good times for they will end.” But he is not a fucking Finn, what do they know anyway, don’t they all kill themselves regularly, or is that a Danish trait? No matter, a pox on all nuggets of grandmother’s wisdom!
    His annoyance with himself grows.
What the hell am I doing here?
I have no desire to see the sights, I know no one who might be able to divert me from my troubles, and I doubt that there is even a decent bar I can drown my sorrows in. He turns decisive, thinks there is no point in making himself more miserable than he deserves to be – he will just take an earlier flight home. He will not tell anyone he has slunk back to London a day after he got to Thimphu, spending more time travelling than he actually spent at his destination! He remembers a self-important academic telling him at a company bash that the truest sign that you had made it was when you spent more time travelling to and from a destination than the amount of time you had actually spent there (he had just returned from a conference in Melbourne). He had thought that the professor was full of shit then, and now that he is about to put his theory into practice he finds no reason to revise his opinion. He asks the waitress for directions to the nearest travel agency and is told that it will be probably be closed for the day. If he is going to be stuck here for another night, the least he can do is get himself some decent food. He enquires where the Swiss Bakery is; TripAdvisor says it makes decent sandwiches and patties – better to getsomething that he finds edible rather than face the prospect of eating ema datse in the hotel restaurant – he had found the fiery national dish of chilies and cheese too hot to handle the first and only time he had tried it.
    At this hour of the evening Norzin Lam is moderately busy – Thimphu’s version of rush hour. As he threads his way through the crowd of locals and the occasional tourist he thinks, not for the first time, that the Bhutanese are an exceptionally attractive people – their natural good looks are accentuated by the national costume most wear, the men in wraparound ghos and knee-length stockings, and the women in full length kiras, garments as effective as saris and kaftans in hiding physical infelicities. As he walks along his mood gradually begins to improve, it’s hard to keep glowering when almost everyone looks you in the eye with a smile. A Maruti van screeches by, a pack of stray dogs angles across the street unmindful of traffic or pedestrians, and up ahead a shimmer of Buddhist monks lights up the gloom in maroon and crimson robes. Most of the business establishments have shut for the day, but he spots what looks like a bookshop and darts in to see if he can find any books by local talent. To his disappointment, the selection is poor – eccentric is probably a better word for it – with an unusually large quantity of Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
sharing space with a clutch of Indian novels and a rather battered paperback of
The War of Angels
.
    The novel spent two years on the bestseller lists, and ended up selling six million copies in various Litmus editions. The company made several million pounds more from the sale of foreign rights, and the movie tie-ins brought waves of newfans to the Seppi brand. The studio was getting impatient for the fourth book, as was everybody else who had a stake in the author, but now, unexpectedly, there was a problem. Seppi, who had so far delivered a book a year, exactly on schedule, had overshot his deadline for Book 4,
Angels Falling
, by six months. Despite repeated reminders, Zach had no word about when he could expect to receive the manuscript. Gabrijela and he talked daily about the situation. The
Angels Falling
hardcover was their biggest autumn release, but there was only so much pressure they could bring to bear