"Nuanced and beautiful" (Ms. Magazine), this debut novel explores the Partition of India as well as contemporary echoes and parallels with sectarian violence around the world.

Lahore, British India. 1943. As World War rages, resentment of colonial rule grows, and with it acts of rebellion. Animated by idealistic dreams of an independent India, Chhote Nanu agrees to plant a bomb intended for the British superintendent of police. Some four years later, following a torturous imprisonment, Chhote flees the city as it descends into violence. Carrying the young son of his murdered wife through scenes of unspeakable bloodshed, he encounters his brother, Barre Nanu, the two of them caught between a vanishing past in the new nation of Pakistan and a profoundly uncertain future in India.

Kanpur, India. 2002. Following the death of his grandfather, Barre Nanu, Karan Khati returns from New York to join his sister in their childhood home, which has been transformed by the embittered Chhote Nanu into a hostel for Hindu pilgrims. When their mother arrives from Delhi, Karan and Ila learn that their fathers were two different men--one Hindu, one Muslim--and how their relationships were doomed by familial bias and prejudice.

Moving back and forth from the tumultuous years surrounding Partition to the era of renewed global sectarianism following 9/11, this arresting story portrays a family and nations divided by the living legacy of colonialism.