Tomb of Sand
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:28th Jan '27
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 28th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize: a playful, magical and utterly original family epic set in contemporary northern India
WINNER OF THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
'A triumph of literature' Financial Times
'Breathtaking ... It's impossible not to be charmed' Guardian
'A novel of enormous intelligence' Daily Telegraph
Eighty-year-old Ma has slipped into a deep depression after the death of her husband. Her responsible eldest son and dutiful daughter-in-law attend to Ma’s every need, while her favourite grandson, Sid, tries to lift her spirits with his guitar. But it is only when Sid’s younger brother brings her a sparkling golden cane covered with butterflies that things begin to change.
Reawakened by the cane’s magical powers, Ma gets out of bed and embarks on an extraordinary new life. She ditches her cumbersome saris, befriends a hijra, and undertakes a fateful journey that will turn the family’s understanding of themselves upside down.
Brimming with folklore and dazzling wordplay, Tomb of Sand transforms one woman’s unexpected rebirth into a masterful exploration of boundaries: between nations and generations, memory and forgetting, grief and joy, life and death. At once heart-wrenching and exuberant, it is a singular celebration of what can happen when we refuse to accept the limits the world has drawn for us.
Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
[A] capacious, breathtaking book ... Translator Daisy Rockwell deserves the equal billing the International Booker endows for translating the novel’s idiosyncratic style so fluently and energetically ... It's impossible not to be charmed * GUARDIAN *
Shree is an excellent observer of women’s inner lives ... This book, this Booker, has come at last, and for me it has come as a breath of fresh air * OBSERVER *
A novel of enormous intelligence * DAILY TELEGRAPH *
Tomb of Sand is in part the story of an elderly woman who arises from her bed to make a journey across frontiers, into a damaged past, but it is also a patchwork of voices and unforgettable characters, chattering among themselves, elbowing one another off the page. Heart-wrenching but brimming with life ... A lasting joy * FINANCIAL TIMES *
Exceptional * IRISH TIMES *
An homage to the vibrancy of Hindi ... [that] takes a page from Salman Rushdie’s playbook with its adept use of magic realism ... [Shree is] unabashedly paving her own path through the sandstorm of writers pining for Western acclaim * WASHINGTON POST *
Shree combines linguistic energy with unflagging wit to uncover the secrets and lies of Indian family life ... [with] a marvelous ear ... Shree has no doubt drawn on the many writer she invokes directly in Tomb of Sand, but the novel I was most reminded of is an English-language one: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children * NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS *
There is a palpable freshness to Shree’s world-building. Her India is a place where walls glide, snakes talk, butterflies know their worth and people are too insignificant to have names. Indeed, in its boldness and experimentation – and in its likelihood of influencing a new generation of authors – this breakthrough novel recalls Shree’s fellow Indian-born Booker laureates, Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things (1997) and Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children (1981) * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *
An extraordinarily exuberant and incredibly playful book ... It manages to take issues of great seriousness — bereavement, loss, death — and conjure up an extraordinary choir, almost a cacophony, of voices ... It is extraordinarily fun and it is extraordinarily funny -- FRANK WYNNE, chair of the International Booker committee
ISBN: 9781037215179
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
752 pages