Tomb of Sand: A Novel

by Geetanjali Shree, Deepti Gupta (Read by), Daisy Rockwell (Translator)

Overview

WINNER OF THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

A playful, feminist, and utterly original epic set in contemporary northern India, about a family and the inimitable octogenarian matriarch at its heart.

“A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself . . .”

Eighty-year-old Ma slips into a deep depression after the death of her husband. Despite her family’s cajoling, she refuses to leave her bed. Her responsible eldest son, Bade, and dutiful, Reebok-sporting daughter-in-law, Bahu, attend to Ma’s every need, while her favorite grandson, the cheerful and gregarious Sid, tries to lift her spirits with his guitar. But it is only after Sid’s younger brother—Serious Son, a young man pathologically incapable of laughing—brings his grandmother a sparkling golden cane covered with butterflies that things begin to change.

With a new lease on life thanks to the cane’s seemingly magical powers, Ma gets out of bed and embarks on a series of adventures that baffle even her unconventional feminist daughter, Beti. She ditches her cumbersome saris, develops a close friendship with a hijra, and sets off on a fateful journey that will turn the family’s understanding of themselves upside down.

Rich with fantastical elements, folklore, and exuberant wordplay, Geetanjali Shree’s magnificent novel explores timely and timeless topics, including Buddhism, global warming, feminism, Partition, gender binary, transcending borders, and the profound joys of life. Elegant, heartbreaking, and funny, it is a literary masterpiece that marks the American debut of an extraordinary writer.

Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell

Author’s name pronounced: Ghee-TAHN-juh-lee Shree

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798212204200
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/31/2023
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Geetanjali Shree (Ghee-TAHN-juh-lee Shree) is the author of five novels, including Tomb of Sand, for which she was awarded the 2022 International Book Prize, and five story collections. Her work has been translated into several languages and has received numerous accolades. She lives in New Delhi.

Daisy Rockwell is an artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand won the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2020, she was the winner of the Scaglioni Prize for Translation of a Literary Work for Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. She has received grants for her translations from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Editorial Reviews

11/28/2022

This alluring, International Booker–winning saga from Shree (The Empty Space) employs magical realism to recount a matriarch’s rebirth in contemporary India. After Ma’s husband dies, she refuses to get out of bed, leaving her oldest son, Bade; his wife, Bahu (also known as “Mem Sahib,” which means white woman living in India); his sons Siddharth and Serious Son; and his feminist sister, Beti, to worry. After receiving a cane covered in colorful butterflies from Overseas Son, Ma holds the cane up and says, “I am the Wishing Tree. I am the Kalpataru.” From there, she gives away most of her possessions and disappears. Later, Ma returns—not to her wealthy son, Bade, but to Beti, and bonds with her old friend Rosie Bua, a hijra who understands the power of the Wishing Tree. The prominent characters’ names are honorifics (“beti” means daughter), as in the charactonyms of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and Ma goes on to challenge expectations of her role as a mother in her rebirth by pursuing autonomy and enlightenment. The leisurely pacing and drawn-out accounts from the various characters make for a slow burn, but Rockwell does a lovely job preserving the Hindi wordplay in Shree’s kaleidoscopic epic. This is worth signing up for the long haul. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

An extraordinarily exuberant and incredibly playful book. . . . It manages to take issues of great seriousness—bereavement, loss, death—and conjure up an extraordinary choir, almost a cacophony, of voices. . . . It is extraordinarily fun and it is extraordinarily funny.”  — Frank Wynne, chair of the International Booker committee

“Tomb of Sand is in part the story of an elderly woman who arises from her bed to make a journey across frontiers, into a damaged past, but it is also a patchwork of voices and unforgettable characters, chattering among themselves, elbowing one another off the page. Heart-wrenching but brimming with life . . . A lasting joy.” — The Financial Times

“Shree combines linguistic energy with unflagging wit to uncover the secrets and lies of Indian family life . . . [with] a marvelous ear. . . . Shree has no doubt drawn on the many writer she invokes directly in Tomb of Sand, but the novel I was most reminded of is an English-language one: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” — New York Review of Books

“Shree is an excellent observer of women’s inner lives. . . . This book, this Booker, has come at last, and for me it has come as a breath of fresh air.”  — The Guardian

"The gorgeous writing is fluid and poetic, yet it is also plain and arresting with its direct second-person narration. Rockwell's translation retains wit and rich flavor. . . . Readers of international literature, award-list titles, and literary fiction will cherish Shree's written intricacies of interior worlds as well as her detailed settings that evoke a strong sense of place." — Booklist

“A triumph of literature.”  — The Financial Times

“Playful, magical and magnetic, this monumental novel speaks to themes of love, grief, family ties, feminism, borders, spirituality, climate change and more.” — Ms. magazine

“Quickly pulls you in and doesn’t let go . . . A fantastical tale of rediscovery and delight in life.” — Apartment Therapy

“A novel of enormous intelligence.”  — The Daily Telegraph

“Stunningly powerful . . . with Tomb of Sand, Shree claims space among the Partition writers she so vividly pays her dues to. Because as with the best literature, it speaks most urgently to the present.”  — The Hindu

“Tomb of Sand is sweeping in subject matter and experimental in language. At the same time it manages to combine folklore and magic with a domestic familial story. It is truly unlike anything I've ever read.” — Asymptote

“[A] capacious, breathtaking book . . . Translator Daisy Rockwell deserves the equal billing the International Booker endows for translating the novel’s idiosyncratic style so fluently and energetically. . . . It's impossible not to be charmed.” — The Guardian

“Exceptional.” — Irish Times

“There is a palpable freshness to Shree’s world-building. Her India is a place where walls glide, snakes talk, butterflies know their worth and people are too insignificant to have names. Indeed, in its boldness and experimentation – and in its likelihood of influencing a new generation of authors – this breakthrough novel recalls Shree’s fellow Indian-born Booker laureates, Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things (1997) and Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children (1981).” — Times Literary Supplement (London)

“An engrossing fable . . . Shree scrupulously examines the demarcation between life and death, mother and daughter, past and present, and how grief and memory, when harnessed, have the power to cultivate long lost connections. The narrator’s witty observations and lengthy humorous asides add to the breadth and depth of this rich novel. . . . For the reader who wades in Shree’s luminous prose, the book’s threads braid into a single, vivid tapestry.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Echoes of James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Leo Tolstoy . . . An enchanting ride.” — BookPage

“An homage to the vibrancy of Hindi . . . [that] takes a page from Salman Rushdie’s playbook with its adept use of magic realism . . . [Shree is] unabashedly paving her own path through the sandstorm of writers pining for Western acclaim.” — Washington Post

From the Publisher

2022-11-16
An 80-year-old woman begins a new life and, in the process, confronts her past.

Winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, this ambitious novel is something of a behemoth, upending and redefining concepts of modernity, boundaries, gender, colonialism, and the India-Pakistan Partition. Along the way, Shree challenges the idea of what a novel—or even a story—can do. At the book’s center is 80-year-old Ma, who lives in Delhi with her son and daughter-in-law. Deeply depressed following her husband’s death, Ma refuses to get out of bed. Then, suddenly, Ma disappears for a few days, and when she turns up again, with no explanation for her absence, she goes to stay with her daughter. Beti, a writer and a divorcée, has spurned the more traditional life her brother pursued and prides herself on her freedom. But as Ma returns to life, Beti is forced to question just how modern and progressive she really is—after all, it’s Ma who’s developing an intimate friendship with a hijra and casting aside her traditional saris; Beti is more discomfited by these actions than she can admit even to herself. The complex relationships depicted here could have filled a dozen other novels, but they are not Shree’s focus. Instead, she tugs at the conventions of the novel itself: “Think of a story as a living being,” she writes. “There are countless beings and countless types of beings.” Some of this material becomes repetitive and could have benefited from a strict editor. Then, too, Shree is occasionally prone to a didacticism that isn’t quite as mind-blowing as she might have intended: “That which is perceived in a state of semiconsciousness is true unvarnished reality,” for example; “A rock is only a rock as long as it’s a rock.” Still, the language games and puns, nimbly translated by Rockwell, are delightful (“Their minds turned to curd: hue and cry occurred”), and Shree’s larger project is truly admirable: an utterly unique novel that redefines its own boundaries even as it unfolds.

Shree's experimental novel doesn’t always succeed—but even when it fails, it fails in a compelling way.

Kirkus Reviews