The Association Of Small Bombs

National Book Award Finalist Winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award Winner of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize One of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the Year One of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year PEN Center USA Literary Award Finalist for Fiction Simpson Family Literary Prize Finalist Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature Longlisted for the FT/Oppenheimer Emerging Voices Award Named a Best Book of the Year by: Buzzfeed, Esquire, New York magazine, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, The AV Club, The Fader, Redbook, Electric Literature, Book Riot, Bustle, Good magazine, PureWow, and PopSugar “Wonderful. . . . Smart, devastating, unpredictable. . . . I suggest you go out and buy this one. Post haste.” —Fiona Maazel, The New York Times Book Review “Brilliant.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “[Mahajan’s] eagerness to go at the bomb from every angle suggests a voracious approach to fiction-making.” —The New Yorker One of the most celebrated novels of recent years, The Association of Small Bombs is an expansive and deeply humane novel that is at once groundbreaking in its empathy, dazzling in its acuity, and ambitious in scope When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family’s television set at a repair shop with their friend Mansoor Ahmed one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb—one of the many “small” bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world—detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb. After a brief stint at university in America, Mansoor returns to Delhi, where his life becomes entangled with the mysterious and charismatic Ayub, a fearless young activist whose own allegiances and beliefs are more malleable than Mansoor could imagine. Woven among the story of the Khuranas and the Ahmeds is the gripping tale of Shockie, a Kashmiri bomb maker who has forsaken his own life for the independence of his homeland. Karan Mahajan writes brilliantly about the effects of terrorism on victims and perpetrators, proving himself to be one of the most provocative and dynamic novelists of his generation.

Mr Ahuja, Delhi's Minister of Urban Development, has too much on his hands: thirteen children and another on the way. Lost among his sprawling, noisy brood he reaches out to Arjun, his eldest, and seemingly wisest, son. But Arjun has his own problems: how to tell the girl on the school bus that he's crazy about her? This uproarious debut follows father and son as they blunder their way over and under the flyovers of the megalopolis in a moving - and fast-moving - comic portrait of modern family life.

After witnessing his two friends killed by a "small" bomb that detonated in a Dehli marketplace, Mansoor Ahmed becomes involved with a charismatic young activist, whose allegiances and beliefs are more changeable than he could have imagined.

A "powerful" (NYT) timely novel about the radicalization of a Muslim teen in California--about where identity truly lies and how we find it. Laguna Beach, California, 2011. Alireza Courdee, a 16-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner. He loses his virginity, takes up surfing, and sneaks away to all-night raves. For the first time, Reza--now Rez--feels like an American teen. Life is smooth; even lying to his strict parents comes easily. But then he changes again, falling out with the bad-boy surfers and in with a group of kids more awake to the world around them, who share his background, and whose ideas fill him with a very different sense of purpose. Within a year, Reza and his girlfriend are making their way to Syria to be part of a Muslim nation rising from the ashes of the civil war. Timely, nuanced, and emotionally forceful, A Good Country is a gorgeous meditation on modern life, religious radicalization, and a young man caught among vastly different worlds. What we are left with at the dramatic end is not an assessment of good or evil, East versus West, but a lingering question that applies to all modern souls: Do we decide how to live, or is our life decided for us?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: VOGUE • FRESH AIR As a professor of physics at MIT, Helen Clapp disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it’s perhaps especially vexing when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died. That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen’s roommate at Harvard. The two women once confided in each other about everything: Helen’s struggles as a young woman in science, Charlie’s as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their shared challenges as parents. But as the years passed, they gradually grew apart. And now Charlie is permanently, tragically gone. Drawn back into her friend’s orbit, Helen is forced to question the laws of the universe that have always steadied her mind and heart. Suspenseful, perceptive, deeply affecting, Lost and Wanted is a story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at the most defining moments of their lives.

Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Nominated for the Man Booker Prize. One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 2013 gives us a sweeping, urgent, contemporary epic about a year in the life of a group of young illegal immigrants living and working together in the north of England. Three young men from very different backgrounds come together in a journey from India to England, where they hope to begin something new. To support their families; where they can, to build their future; to show their worth; to escape the past. They have almost no idea of what awaits them. In a dilapidated shared house in Sheffield, Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his life in Bihar. Avtar has a secret that binds him to the unpredictable Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa-wife in a flat on the other side of town, whose cupboards are full of her husband's clothes in case the immigration men surprise her with a visit. She is Narinder, and her story is the most surprising of all. Utterly absorbing and beautiful, sweeping in scope, The Year of the Runaways is written with compassion touched by grace. As Tochi, Avtar, Randeep and Narinder negotiate their dreams, desires and shocking realities, as their histories continue to pull at them, as the seasons pass, what emerges is a novel of overwhelming humanity: one which asks how far we can decide our own course in life, and what we should do for love, for faith, and for family.

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2021 * One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 * New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize “Dizzyingly original, fiercely funny, deeply wise.” —Celeste Ng, #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere “Sanjena Sathian’s Gold Diggers is a work of 24-karat genius.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post How far would you go for a piece of the American dream? A magical realist coming-of-age story, Gold Diggers skewers the model minority myth to tell a hilarious and moving story about immigrant identity, community, and the underside of ambition. A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is funny and smart but struggles to bear the weight of expectations of his family and their Asian American enclave. He tries to want their version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal. When he discovers that Anita is the beneficiary of an ancient, alchemical potion made from stolen gold—a “lemonade” that harnesses the ambition of the gold’s original owner—Neil sees his chance to get ahead. But events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart. Years later in the Bay Area, Neil still bristles against his community's expectations—and finds he might need one more hit of that lemonade, no matter the cost. Sanjena Sathian’s astonishing debut offers a fine-grained, profoundly intelligent, and bitingly funny investigation into what's required to make it in America. Soon to be a series produced by Mindy Kaling!