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.Ĭosmo's one of the best books by BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) writers to get excited about in 2019. The first and the last chapters of the novel start with: I am thirty. The Far Field is a confession by Shalini, a 30-something living in Bangalore. 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. Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel is a fictional attempt to know Kashmir from both extremesthe latter more than the formerthrough the lense of a woman visiting here for the first time. 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. 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. 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.
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