Our City That Year: A Novel by Geetanjali Shree (Paperback) (PREORDER)

Fiction - Literary - World Literature - India - Political - Cultural Heritage

Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell

RELEASE DATE: 4/1/2025 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE AND ARRIVE 1-2 DAYS AFTER THE RELEASE DATE)

From the International Booker Prize-winning author-translator duo of Tomb of Sand, a powerful, kaleidoscopic novel about a fractured society, loosely based on the gathering violence that led to the demolition of the Babri Mosque by religious extremists in 1992.

“That year, in our city, Hindus abandoned their pacifism. We’ve run out of other cheeks to turn, they proclaimed. We’re helpless! they screamed. They climbed atop mosques and waved the flag of Devi from the prongs of tridents proclaiming, What was done to us will be visited on them! Wrong shall be answered with wrong!”

In an unnamed city in India, violence is erupting between Hindus and Muslims, each side viewing the other with suspicion, rage, and blame. As their identities sharpen, friends and colleagues turn against each other. Hospital beds fill up and classrooms empty out. Curfews are imposed. Residents flee en masse.

Three intellectuals find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and fear. Shruti, a creative writer, spends her time writing and rewriting the same sentence. Hanif is sidelined by his academic department for his own beliefs. And Sharad finds it increasingly difficult to connect with Hanif, his childhood friend. The only one left to bear witness is the novel’s unnamed narrator, who hurries to transcribe everything that’s happening.

Explosive, raw, and uncompromising, Our City That Year unfolds in a time of rising uncertainty and dread, when nothing will go back to being as it was before. Twenty-five years after its original publication in Hindi, Shree’s clarion call to bear witness to the toxic ideology of religious nationalism is timelier than ever, speaking to the growing divisions across global borders.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Geetanjali Shree (Ghee-TAHN-juh-lee Shree) is the author of five novels and several story collections. Her work has been translated into English, French, German, Serbian, Korean, and several South Asian languages, and has received numerous accolades. She also writes scripts for theater. She lives in New Delhi, India.

TRANSLATOR BIO: 

Daisy Rockwell is a painter, writer, and translator living in Vermont. She has translated a number of classic works of Hindi and Urdu literature, and in 2019 she was awarded the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for her translation of Krishna Sobti's A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There.