The Far Field
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Remarkable . . . Vijay traces the fault lines of history, love, and obligation running through a fractured family and country.” —Anthony Marra, New York Times–bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno
Winner of the 2019 JCB Prize for Literature
Gorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize–winner Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present.
In the wake of her mother’s death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir’s politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love.
With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion.
“A chance to glimpse the lives of distant people captured in prose gorgeous enough to make them indelible—and honest enough to make them real.” —The Washington Post
“A singular story of mother and daughter.” —Entertainment Weekly
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Privilege has catastrophic consequences in Madhuri Vijay’s sweeping debut. Raised by a well-meaning but ineffective father and an increasingly unstable mother who eventually took her own life, Shalini is a grown woman who hasn’t really grown up yet. At 30, she decides she needs answers about who her mother really was, so she sets out from her well-off family’s home on a quest that leads her deep into the oppressed and impoverished Kashmir region. We empathized with the sheltered Shalini’s urge to help the people she encounters, even as her total cluelessness (and tendency to do more harm than good) made us cringe. Vijay’s brilliant novel is a clever cautionary fable about privilege and the pitfalls of do-gooder syndrome.