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History's Angel  By  cover art

History's Angel

By: Anjum Hasan
Narrated by: Sagar Arya
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Publisher's summary

A darkly funny, sharply observed, and deeply moving novel about the surprises and struggles of life in contemporary Delhi

Alif is a middle-aged, mild-mannered history teacher, living in contemporary Delhi, at a time in India’s history when Muslims 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 shockingly moving novel, Anjum Hasan deftly and delicately explores the life of Muslims in India and the force and consequence of remembering your people’s history in an increasingly indifferent milieu.

©2023 Anjum Hasan (P)2023 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

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)
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)

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