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.
Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
Author Info
Geetanjali Shree (Ghee-TAHN-juh-lee Shree) is the author of five novels, including Tomb of Sand, for which she was awarded the 2022 International Book Prize, and five story collections. Her work has been translated into several languages and has received numerous accolades. She lives in New Delhi.
Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand won the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2020, she was the winner of the Scaglioni Prize for Translation of a Literary Work for Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. She has received grants for her translations from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
