The long-awaited new novel from the award-winning author of The Parcel. An unforgettable, heartbreaking, often darkly funny story of a boy growing up in Bombay, India against the backdrop of the 1990s riots.
As a city turns savage, a young boy’s mind turns against him.
Anosh Irani’s new novel is set in the volatile Bombay, India of the early 1990s. It takes us inside the mind and heart of a motherless boy named Hafiz, asking: what happens when the riots and discord on the streets are echoed inside your own mind and body?
Hafez lives with his older brother, his often-absent father, and his beloved grandmother in a protected Parsi enclave within the city of Mumbai. He feels safe inside his home and the gates of his community, but the outside world is increasingly unpredictable, raging and tipping into violence. Meanwhile, Hafez has personal instability to manage. His mother died when he was a baby, his much-older brother ignores or patronizes him, and he has developed a desperate romantic attachment to his brother’s girlfriend, who comes from a wealthy and influential family. Only Hafez’s doting grandmother seems to love him―and she is increasingly fragile. Then, one day, trying to defuse a fight at the gates of the enclave, his grandmother dies.
What happens when the only person who makes you feel loved disappears? In this brilliant exploration of the aftershocks of violence, internal and external, Anosh Irani crafts an unforgettable, compulsively readable, and sharply funny portrait of madness, impossible love and the making of an artist.
Genre: Literary Fiction
As a city turns savage, a young boy’s mind turns against him.
Anosh Irani’s new novel is set in the volatile Bombay, India of the early 1990s. It takes us inside the mind and heart of a motherless boy named Hafiz, asking: what happens when the riots and discord on the streets are echoed inside your own mind and body?
Hafez lives with his older brother, his often-absent father, and his beloved grandmother in a protected Parsi enclave within the city of Mumbai. He feels safe inside his home and the gates of his community, but the outside world is increasingly unpredictable, raging and tipping into violence. Meanwhile, Hafez has personal instability to manage. His mother died when he was a baby, his much-older brother ignores or patronizes him, and he has developed a desperate romantic attachment to his brother’s girlfriend, who comes from a wealthy and influential family. Only Hafez’s doting grandmother seems to love him―and she is increasingly fragile. Then, one day, trying to defuse a fight at the gates of the enclave, his grandmother dies.
What happens when the only person who makes you feel loved disappears? In this brilliant exploration of the aftershocks of violence, internal and external, Anosh Irani crafts an unforgettable, compulsively readable, and sharply funny portrait of madness, impossible love and the making of an artist.
Genre: Literary Fiction