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
“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.” — The Financial Times
“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.” — The Guardian
"The gorgeous writing is fluid and poetic, yet it is also plain and arresting with its direct second-person narration. Rockwell's translation retains wit and rich flavor. . . . Readers of international literature, award-list titles, and literary fiction will cherish Shree's written intricacies of interior worlds as well as her detailed settings that evoke a strong sense of place." — Booklist
“A triumph of literature.” — The Financial Times
“A novel of enormous intelligence.” — The Daily Telegraph
“Stunningly powerful . . . with Tomb of Sand, Shree claims space among the Partition writers she so vividly pays her dues to. Because as with the best literature, it speaks most urgently to the present.” — The Hindu
“[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.” — The Guardian
“Exceptional.” — Irish Times
“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 (London)
2022-11-16
An 80-year-old woman begins a new life and, in the process, confronts her past.
Winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, this ambitious novel is something of a behemoth, upending and redefining concepts of modernity, boundaries, gender, colonialism, and the India-Pakistan Partition. Along the way, Shree challenges the idea of what a novel—or even a story—can do. At the book’s center is 80-year-old Ma, who lives in Delhi with her son and daughter-in-law. Deeply depressed following her husband’s death, Ma refuses to get out of bed. Then, suddenly, Ma disappears for a few days, and when she turns up again, with no explanation for her absence, she goes to stay with her daughter. Beti, a writer and a divorcée, has spurned the more traditional life her brother pursued and prides herself on her freedom. But as Ma returns to life, Beti is forced to question just how modern and progressive she really is—after all, it’s Ma who’s developing an intimate friendship with a hijra and casting aside her traditional saris; Beti is more discomfited by these actions than she can admit even to herself. The complex relationships depicted here could have filled a dozen other novels, but they are not Shree’s focus. Instead, she tugs at the conventions of the novel itself: “Think of a story as a living being,” she writes. “There are countless beings and countless types of beings.” Some of this material becomes repetitive and could have benefited from a strict editor. Then, too, Shree is occasionally prone to a didacticism that isn’t quite as mind-blowing as she might have intended: “That which is perceived in a state of semiconsciousness is true unvarnished reality,” for example; “A rock is only a rock as long as it’s a rock.” Still, the language games and puns, nimbly translated by Rockwell, are delightful (“Their minds turned to curd: hue and cry occurred”), and Shree’s larger project is truly admirable: an utterly unique novel that redefines its own boundaries even as it unfolds.
Shree's experimental novel doesn’t always succeed—but even when it fails, it fails in a compelling way.
