Description

Sixteen stories. Sixteen quietly devastating Indian lives.

In Imran Qureshi’s remarkable debut collection, an old Hyderabadi watchmaker’s son returns home after fourteen years to find his father has stopped speaking; a woman in Pune writes a letter she has been composing in her head since 1998; a Kashmiri schoolteacher in Sopore makes a single, irreversible decision on a Friday afternoon; a Bohra bride realises, on the morning after her wedding, that the man she has married is gentler and more dangerous than she had been warned; a young software engineer in Bangalore receives a phone call about a brother he had been told was dead.

Across cities and communities — Hyderabad, Kashmir, Pune, Bangalore, Mau, Karachi, a small town outside Coimbatore — Qureshi writes with the patient, almost surgical attention of a writer who knows that the most important thing in any story is what is not, finally, said out loud.

These are stories about silence: the silences inside marriages, the silences inside families, the long careful silences a country wraps around its grief. They are also, against the odds, stories of luminous, unexpected tenderness — written in the kind of clean, unshowy prose that earns its emotional moments the slow, honest way.

A debut collection that announces a major new Indian short-story writer. For readers of *Jhumpa Lahiri* and *Mahesh Rao*.