3 Review(s)

Vishnu, a twenty-one-year-old Indian student out drinking in a bar in Washington D.C., is murdered in a hate crime. At themoment of his death, Vishnu takes flight and traces the sequence of events that led to his life being extinguished. Speedingthrough the past, present, and future, his consciousness witnesses the hate and violence on two continents. As Vishnu looks backon his short life, we see the brutal acts of his father who built an empire in the Hindi heartland of India on the blood and trampledbeliefs of others so his family could lead the good life. When Vishnu gets to America, he finds that the detestation and otheringthat targeted one set of people in his homeland is replaced by more of the same in the country he has landed in, except this timehe doesn’t belong to the class of oppressors but that of the oppressed.Visceral and intense, this tremendous debut novel is a clear-eyed look at the barbarity that lies just beneath the surface in countrieslike India and America and the toll it takes on the lives of innocents.