Author(s): Anjum Hasan

Novel | Humour & Satire | India

From the Man Asian Literary Prize-longlisted author, the story of a middle-aged man in contemporary India discovering that neither his life nor his country are as stable as he thought.

Alif is a middle-aged, mild-mannered history teacher, living in contemporary Delhi, at a time when Muslims in India are seen either as hapless victims or live threats. Though his life's passion is the history he teaches, it's the present that presses down on him: his wife is set on a bigger house and a better car while trying to ace her MBA exams; his teenage son wants to quit school to get rich; his supercilious colleagues are suspicious of a Muslim teaching India's history; and his old friend Ganesh has just reconnected with a childhood sweetheart with whom Alif was always rather enamored himself. And then the unthinkable happens.
While Alif is leading a school field trip, a student goads him and, in a fit of anger, Alif twists his ear. His job suddenly on the line, Alif finds his life rapidly descending into chaos. Meanwhile, his home city, too, darkens under the spreading shadow of violence.
In this darkly funny, sharply observed and deeply moving novel, Anjum Hasan deftly and delicately explores the force and the consequences of remembering your people's history in an increasingly indifferent milieu.

Review: A wonderful Delhi novel for our times, a Shahr-e-Ashob of the new India. History's Angel is eloquent, brave, elegaic and ultimately, heartbreaking. This remarkable novel reminded me of both of Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi and Anita Desai's In Custody, and confirms Anjum Hasan as one of our finest and most important writers -- WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Poignant ... An unsettling, piercingly intimate portrait of the rough birth of Modi's new India * FINANCIAL TIMES *
A beautiful novel exploring tensions in modern India ... timely and elegiac * OBSERVER *
Hasan grants this hero such a complete inner life - and surrounds him with such finely drawn characters - that the very air he breathes seems dense with thoughts and longings * WALL STREET JOURNAL *
An extraordinary tale of an ordinary Muslim ... Hasan is cannily observant, a sophisticated writer with a wry and subtle sense of humour, with which she highlights the ridiculousness and futility of seemingly ordinary milieus, while never detracting from the increasing alienation of a community * TRIBUNE INDIA *
Poignant and thought-provoking...deftly highlights the power of ideas * NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS *
One of the finest contemporary Indian fiction writers... [A] sparkling new novel * independent.co.uk *
An engrossing read * THE PATRIOT *
An important book ... the characters are compelling, the setting accurate and the sentences shine * HINDUSTAN TIMES *
This absorbing novel trespasses, from sentence to sentence, the boundaries that usually demarcate the grandeur of the historical from the tedium, humour, and disappointments of ordinary human life. Domesticity, everyday routine, and our historical pasts and futures are conjoined here tantalisingly, with impressive skill, and with real tenderness -- AMIT CHAUDHURI
A shimmering, intelligent rage roils under a cool surface in History's Angel, which manages at once to be "made so insistantly, so noisily, of now" and inhabit layers of history. Hasan's eye is sharp and her aim is unerring. This is a work of sublime elegance -- SHRUTI SWAMY
A seething seismic tale about the disturbing times the Muslims of India are living through, in ever growing dread of worse to come. Told in a subdued, sad, ironical tenor, it is compassionate without being sentimental. The novel asserts humanity and hope in the face of widening fissures through its main protagonist who, drawing sustenance from a deep historical perspective, refuses to play the victim and negotiates the situation empathetically -- GEETANJALI SHREE, author of the International Booker Prize-winning Tomb of Sand
Erudite and languid ... Hasan's layering of history and personal drama accrues a subtle but undeniable power * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY *
Extremely timely ... History's Angel helps us view the erasures of the past through a living lens. With sensitivity and nuance, Anjum Hasan draws us into the world of Alif, a Muslim history teacher in contemporary Delhi -- DAISY ROCKWELL
Thoughtful, erudite, balancing the country's contradictions like a Parisian waiter with an overcrowded tray ... Does for Delhi what Joyce did for Dublin * STRONG WORDS *

Author Biography: Anjum Hasan is the author of three novels and two short story collections, which have been shortlisted for the Indian Academy of Letters Prize, the Sahiya Akademi Award, the Hindu Best Fiction Award and the Crossword Fiction Award, as well as being longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Granta, Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, among many others.