The magnificent new novel from two-time Giller-winning author M.G. Vassanji, a sweeping story set in India and North America.
The Assassin's Song opens in the 1960s in a village in Western India, the site of the thirteenth-century Sufi shrine of Pirbaag. Karsan Dargawalla is next in line after his father to assume the lordship of the shrine. But Karsan longs to be “just ordinary” - to be a great cricketer and play for his country and, at the urging of a truck driver, to learn more and more about the world. In secret he applies to go to Harvard, and when he is accepted, he can't resist the opportunity - though this means profound disappointment for his father and heartbreak for his mother. Soon the intellectual excitement and discoveries of his new life compel him to abdicate his succession to the throne. But even as he succeeds in his “ordinary life” - becoming a professor, marrying and having a son, leading a charmed suburban existence in British Columbia - his heritage continues to haunt him. Finally when a personal tragedy strikes in Canada, and Pirbaag is devastated by communal violence, he is drawn back across thirty years of separation and silence to discover what, if anything, is left for him in India.
A story of grand historical sweep and intricate personal drama, a stunning evocation of the physical and emotional landscape of a man caught between filial obligation and personal yearning, between the ancient and the modern - The Assassin's Song is a luminous novel.
Genre: Literary Fiction
The Assassin's Song opens in the 1960s in a village in Western India, the site of the thirteenth-century Sufi shrine of Pirbaag. Karsan Dargawalla is next in line after his father to assume the lordship of the shrine. But Karsan longs to be “just ordinary” - to be a great cricketer and play for his country and, at the urging of a truck driver, to learn more and more about the world. In secret he applies to go to Harvard, and when he is accepted, he can't resist the opportunity - though this means profound disappointment for his father and heartbreak for his mother. Soon the intellectual excitement and discoveries of his new life compel him to abdicate his succession to the throne. But even as he succeeds in his “ordinary life” - becoming a professor, marrying and having a son, leading a charmed suburban existence in British Columbia - his heritage continues to haunt him. Finally when a personal tragedy strikes in Canada, and Pirbaag is devastated by communal violence, he is drawn back across thirty years of separation and silence to discover what, if anything, is left for him in India.
A story of grand historical sweep and intricate personal drama, a stunning evocation of the physical and emotional landscape of a man caught between filial obligation and personal yearning, between the ancient and the modern - The Assassin's Song is a luminous novel.
Genre: Literary Fiction
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