Debut novelists are conscious of giving their books a strong and gripping first paragraph – unfastening their first window onto the literary world, no writer should risk having readers put the book back on the shelf after a mere glance at the first page. This novel by Deepti Kapoor has one of the most magnificent openings I have seen in recent times: spare, unsparing and holding all the promise of a cracking story.

‘My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken on the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night.

Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle page, one line standing out, the last one, in which a cop he’d never met said to the reporter, He was known to us, he was a bad character.’

The only problem with such a terrific opener is that what follows must measure up and here, alas, I found the book and its characters wanting.

After losing her mother, college student Idha is moved from Agra to Delhi to live with a well-meaning but vacuous aunt. Lonely and unhappy, Idha resists all efforts at enforced friendships, taking up instead with a man who chats her up in a café. He is ugly, mysterious and clearly troubled but perhaps that is exactly the attraction for a needy young woman standing at a perilous emotional crossroad. Before too long (this is a slim novel), the pair have embarked on a destructive journey of sex and drugs which sends them spinning out to separate but equally doomed conclusions.

What raises this rather insufficient story is the fractured, non-linear and ruminative narrative which sucks the reader right into the emotions that torment Idha, the humiliating choreograph of the arranged marriage scene, the highs and lows of her first sexual experiences and, later, her increasingly drug-addled existence. She’s a curious character, however, and, much as one sympathises, she is difficult to like. Readability is a difficult thing to pull off, particularly in a novel so sparse of characters, but it is especially hard when the reader isn’t exactly rooting for the protagonist.

Nevertheless, Kapoor’s language would not seem out of place in a poetry collection and there are some marvellously clever turns of phrases. Idha, arriving in a monsoonal Delhi after leaving Agra sees ‘rain on the grille, the cold air twisting through like a string of magician’s silk. A note of thunder rolling through the vault of cloud, the wind rattling water through the trees.’ And then she remembers, sadness swelling through the simple sentence, ‘my mother, left behind in the river and on the wind’. Later, driving alone through the streets of Delhi, she describes the terror experienced by every woman who has ever lived in that city of swirling winter mists and staring eyes: ‘At traffic lights, in the middle of a jam. Stuck behind cages of chickens stacked in the back of tempos, waiting to be killed. They do notice me, these eyes, discovering I’m all alone in this city of meat and men.’

The story of a young woman’s sexual and sensual awakening, set in the city of my own youth, could so easily have held me rapt. The reason it did not, despite the book’s and my own best efforts, was exactly that - there was too much effort, it tried too hard. To borrow Tim Parks’s phrase for Graham Swift’s work – this was a ‘relentlessly literary’ read. And sometimes all one wants is a good story.