"The dissolution of the British Raj into what is now India and Pakistan was a man-made tragedy that need not have happened. A line drawn on a map was supposed to separate peoples of different faiths, but as history has shown again and again geography is not so simple. Families were ripped apart, hundreds of thousands died, and the repercussions are still being felt to this day. This amazing debut explores a family as it grapples with the scars of this event, and how they move on."
Publisher Milkweed Editions
Publication Date 2023-09-19
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Brad L.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781639550142
A marvelous debut novel exploring the fractures caused by the Partition of India, as well as the legacy and contemporary parallels of sectarian violence around the world.
Lahore, British India. 1943. As World War rages, resentment of colonial rule grows, and with it acts of rebellion. Animated by idealistic dreams of an independent India, Chhote Nanu agrees to plant a bomb intended for the British superintendent of police. Some four years later, following a torturous imprisonment, Chhote flees the city as it descends into violence. Carrying the young son of his murdered wife through scenes of unspeakable bloodshed, he encounters his brother, Barre Nanu, the two of them caught between a vanishing past in the new nation of Pakistan and a profoundly uncertain future in India.
Kanpur, India. 2002. Following the death of his grandfather, Barre Nanu, Karan Khati returns from New York to join his sister in their childhood home, which has been transformed by the embittered Chhote Nanu into a hostel for Hindu pilgrims. When their mother arrives from Delhi, Karan and Ila learn that their fathers were two different men—one Hindu, one Muslim—relationships with both of whom were doomed by familial bias and prejudice, the siblings resolve to reconnect, and to understand the painful twist and turns in the family’s story.
Moving back and forth from the tumultuous years surrounding Partition to the era of renewed global sectarianism following 9/11, this extraordinary historical novel, “Tolstoyan in its scope” (Ha Jin), portrays a family and nations divided by the living legacy of colonialism. Richly evocative, timely, House of Caravans will endure in the ways only the best literature does.
