This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart

A Memoir in Halves

By: Madhur Anand

Narrated by: Ellora Patnaik, Asha Vijayasingham, Raoul Bhaneja

Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

Winner of the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction

“Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader...This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual tour de force.” (Jane Urquhart)

An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present.

We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter's tale - we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father's leg, the virus of a mother's rage, makes its way to the next generation.

Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the listener in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.

©2020 Madhur Anand (P)2020 Strange Light

Critic reviews

"Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader, Madhur Anand's exquisite and complex memoir explores memory, science, place, migration, relationships, and ecology, and delves deeply into the multiple meanings of partition. This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual tour de force." (Jane Urquhart, author of The Stonecarvers)

"An electrical storm of a book. Sweeping, gorgeous, bold, and piercing, Madhur Anand writes with control and heat, a far-reaching brain and a poet's heart. This Red Line achieves the rarest feat: it takes two asymmetrical halves and assembles them into a whole - as vivid and uneasy as life itself." (Claudia Dey, Heartbreaker and Stunt)