Book Description
“I highlighted just about every line in this book, and I can’t think of a better novel to make sense of our current era.” —Molly Odintz, CrimeReads
 
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 eventuated in the demolition of the Babri Mosque by religious extremists in 1992.
 
In an unnamed city in India, a wave of sectarian violence is erupting between Hindus and Muslims, each side viewing the other with suspicion, rage, and blame. As their identities sharpen in this work of political fiction, 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 secular beliefs. And Sharad finds it increasingly difficult to connect with Hanif, his childhood friend. The only one left to bear witness in this compelling story 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 novel of social commentary and her 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
 
About the Author and Translator
Geetanjali Shree is the author of five novels, including Tomb of Sand for which she was awarded the 2022 International Booker Prize, and five story collections. Her work has been translated into several European and South Asian languages, and has received numerous accolades. She lives in New Delhi, India.
 
Daisy Rockwell is a painter, writer, and translator living in Vermont who was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2022 for her translation of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand
She has also 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.