A darkly funny and shockingly moving novel about history, change and identity, set in contemporary Delhi.

Alif is a middle-aged, mild-mannered school teacher of history, living at a time in India's history when Muslims are seen either as hapless victims or a live threat. Though his profession sees him occupied with the past, the present is pressing down on him: his wife, set on a bigger house and a better car while trying to ace her MBA exams; his teenage son wanting to quit school to get rich; his ageing parents, especially his increasingly distracted father; supercilious colleagues suspicious of a Muslim teaching India's history; and his old friend Ganesh, who has just reconnected with childhood sweetheart with whom Alif was always rather enamoured himself. While Alif is leading a school trip to a glorious Mughal monument one day, a Hindu student goads him about being Muslim - and in a fit of anger, Alif twists his ear. Suddenly out of a job, Alif finds his life rapidly descending into chaos; while in the background, his home city, too, darkens under the spreading shadow of violence.

Anjum Hasan is the author of three novels and two short story collections, which have been shortlisted for the Indian Academy of Letters Prize, the Sahiya Akademi Award, the Hindu Best Fiction Award and the Crossword Fiction Award, as well as being longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. She is a recipient of a Homi Bhabha Fellowship, and this year received the one-of-its-kind New India
Foundation Fellowship to write her first non-fiction book, a contemporary history of the city of Shillong. She has earlier been on a Homi Bhabha Fellowship - and was recently hailed by First Post Magazine as a 'genius ... one of the finest Indian writers.'