Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize from the internationally admired new face of fiction author, Padma Viswanathan, comes a compelling new work. It is set among families of those who lost their loved ones in the 1985 Air India bombing, recording the unforeseen aftershocks of this disaster in the lives of its survivors. The book demonstrates that vicious politics is all-too-often home grown in North America but overlooked at our peril. In 2004, almost two decades after the deadly bombing of an Air India flight from Vancouver, two suspects were finally on trial for the heinous crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in Canada, returns to do a 'study of comparative grief’. For this, he interviews people who had lost loved ones in the attack. What he overlooks, is to mention he too had lost family members in the tragedy. He becomes involved in the lives of one family caught in the tide of the tragedy and becomes aware of its secrets. This astonishing emotional connection, strangely, encourages him to confront his own losses.
