Shumona Sinha

Translated from the French
by Teresa Lavender Fagan

Published: 4 August 2022

FINALIST FOR THE FRENCH-AMERICAN FOUNDATION TRANSLATION PRIZE 2024
Listed by Preti Taneja in The New Statesman’s Best Books of 2022

Read the beginning on Bookanista.

Over the course of a night in police custody, a young woman tries to understand the rage that led her to assault a refugee on the Paris metro. She too is a foreigner, now earning a living as an interpreter for asylum seekers in the outskirts of the city. Translating the stories of men and women who come from her country of birth, into the language of her country of citizenship, Sinha’s narrator finds herself caught up in a tangle of lies and truths. Armed with an acerbic sense of humour she exposes prejudices on all sides.

'A provocative and visceral book about class, caste, fear and self-loathing, exposing the real generational damage Imperialism wreaks on brown minds. Shumona Sinha gets inside the skin of an everyday woman turned monster by the system: her voice grips the imagination and does not let go.' - Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath

‘The voice is singular and compelling. It brought to mind Mohsin Hamid meets Sangeeta Bandyopdhyay, Virginie Despentes and Lynne Tillman. It throws up lots of questions about legitimate/ illegitimate status in Europe seen through the eyes of PoC and the tension between the two. Empire, whitewashing, playing the good immigrant underscore the prose. It’s a book that doesn’t give you all the answers, but that’s not the point of it really.’ – Niven Govinden, on Instagram

‘A novel as singular in its subject matter as in its language and unbridled energy. Through the poetic force of her writing, Sinha brings a broken world to burning point.’ – Le Monde

‘Sinha lays bare so much of the nuance and the violence imposed on individuals by the systems in the world meant to keep certain people down.’ – Emma Ramadan, translator of Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras

Paperback with lilac endpages
180x120mm, 150 pages
ISBN 978-1-8384904-6-1

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