do not say we have nothing by madeleine thien

When a 12-year-old child bride-unnamed, but literate, unusual for her time-is married off to a 40-year-old widower in 1900, she becomes the surrogate mother to his two-year-old son, JoJo. Verghese ( Cutting for Stone) sets his story in the small community of Saint Thomas Christians in Kerala, centered on the estate of Parambil. Julia Kastner, librarian, teacher and blogger at pagesofjuliaĪbraham Verghese's sprawling second novel, The Covenant of Water, traces the epic story of a family in southern India afflicted by a mysterious condition: at least one person in every generation dies by drowning. Oza's gorgeous prose is lush with detail-colors, flavors, emotions-and saturated with loveliness and pain, 'the messy, the beautiful, the wild improbable light.' A History of Burning admirably charts how-by the time Pirbhai's descendants plant seeds in Canadian soil-history, both personal and collective, is formed from the stories we tell and the silences we allow to remain. Pirbhai's son, Vinod, thinks there must be a 'third possibility-not African, not Indian, but something beyond borders, an identity forged over decades of scattering apart and, miraculously, finding repair.' Each generation struggles in a new place, the tight-knit family always navigating change and searching for a place to call their own. After Ugandan independence, anti-Asian sentiment drives them out of the only country they have known. Pirbhai builds a family and a community with other Indian Africans his children and grandchildren feel buoyed by the strong ties but sometimes limited by the strictures of tradition and duty. In exchange for a coin and the promise of opportunity, he unwittingly sells himself into labor on the railroad the British are building in East Africa. Readers first meet 13-year-old Pirbhai in Gujarat, India he is, as the oldest son, fierce with the need to provide for his family.

In nearly a dozen voices, Oza's debut novel illuminates immigration patterns and pain alongside familial joys and sorrows. Janika Oza's A History of Burning is a stunning multigenerational saga that follows a family and a community who move during the years 1898 to 1992 from India to Kenya to Uganda, to Canada and the U.K., and beyond.

Do not say we have nothing by madeleine thien