Anjum, born Aftab, spreads a worn Persian carpet in a Delhi graveyard and makes a home there, which is where this novel begins gathering its people.
Arundhati Roy moves across years and across the subcontinent, from the crowded lanes of Old Delhi to the valleys of Kashmir, where the language of peace and war has been thoroughly inverted. Tilo and her lovers past and present, a former suitor now doing intelligence work out of Kabul, and two children who share a name carry the other strands. The book alternates between tenderness and open anger, told sometimes in a whisper and sometimes as direct political argument, and its characters are people the world broke and other people patched back together.
The essentials:
• Roy's second novel, following The God of Small Things
• Set across Old Delhi, Kashmir and the country in between
• Interwoven storylines rather than a single linear plot
• Combines political witness with intimate character writing
For readers of literary fiction and contemporary South Asian writing, available from Boipoka.
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