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It’s 1947 in Lahore, and the Sharma family is forced to flee their home during the violence of the Partition of India. As the train tracks measure the ever-growing distance between Varoon and his mother, who vanished during the panic to escape, the boy is thrust towards an uncertain future.
Forty years later, Varoon’s grown son, Anush, desperately tries to disentangle himself from his father’s demands, which are mired in grief and whiskey. Compounding the pressure is an unusually auspicious kundali—a Vedic birth chart—which threatens to suffocate Anush with lofty expectations. But when he meets Nasreen, he feels he may finally be experiencing the incredible fate foretold. Until his father interferes and blocks his chance at true happiness.
Threading artfully through three generations of an Indian family, An Extraordinary Destiny crafts an intricate narrative that reveals, in layers, how decades-old grief rooted in the trauma of history, and couched in familial duty and custom, threaten to sever the sacred connection between ancestors and descendants.
An Extraordinary Destiny . . . by Shekhar Paleja establishes him as an author to look up to. His writing is authentic, his voice is strong and complex, and his characters are living beings worthy of following . . . a well-researched, entertaining and an eye-opening narration of a coming of age story that can help you relate to a culture you’d otherwise never experience.
Epic . . . Shekhar Paleja’s debut marks the arrival of a stunning new writer . . . The comparisons to the work of award-winning Indian-American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri are going to be inevitable and fast coming.
In a moment awake to the spectres of fascism in America and Europe, one can only be struck by the scarcity of international attention to the well-established Hindu nationalism in India. Shekhar Paleja’s debut novel charts this movement’s rise by examining the currency of the kundali . . . A good start for a debut novelist; a worthy read for the arc of the story.
384 Pages
8.5in * 5.5in * 0.80in
1gr
April 11, 2017
9781927366592
eng
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