Novel Navigators

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, in The Details an unnamed woman is bedridden with a high fever when she gets the urge to revisit a novel from her past. As she flips through the novel, scenes of her own life and previous relationships come alive. "The Details is a novel built around four portraits ; the small details that, pieced together, comprise a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is the real subject of the portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? This exhilarating, provocative tale raises profound questions about the nature of relationships, and how we tell our stories. The result is an intimate and illuminating study of what it means to be human." (Goodreads)

Winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, Tomb of Sand tells the story of an 80 year old woman, so depressed following her husband's death that she literally turns her face to the wall ultimately resurfacing to a new lease on life in which she flies in the face of convention, becoming more modern than her bohemian daughter, and insists of traveling back to Pakistan "simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist." (Goodreads) The translator, Daisy Rockwell, says the novel was challenging to translate. "The narrative is experimental, fragmented and dreamlike, full of language tricks and invented words. It’s laced with references to Sanskrit classics, Bollywood movies, song lyrics, prayers and chants, and contemporary Hindi and Urdu novelists." (New York Times review by Alexandra Alter). Nevertheless Rockwell's translation won the prize.