National Book Award Finalist
The Association of Small Bombs
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. 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.
Publisher
Viking (Penguin)
Publication
2016 (US, India, UK)
"One of the 10 Best Books of 2016"— The New York Times
Awards
Winner
- •NYPL Young Lions Award
- •American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award
- •Anisfield-Wolf Award
- •Bard Fiction Prize
- •Muse India Young Writer Award
Finalist
- •2016 National Book Awards
- •Raymond Crossword Book Award (India)
- •Tata Literature Live "Book of the Year" Prize
- •DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
- •Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction in Texas
- •PEN Center USA Prize for Literature
- •Simpson Family Literary Prize
Named a Best Book of 2016 by
Critical Praise
"Wonderful...smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. If you enjoy novels that happily disrupt traditional narratives—about grief, death, violence, politics—I suggest you go out and buy this one. Post haste....thrilling, tender and tragic...generous without prejudice, which feels at once subversive and refreshing."
"Brilliant, troubling...superbly suspenseful...Mr. Mahajan's writing is acrid and bracing, tightly packed with dissonant imagery...The finest [novel] I've read at capturing the seduction and force of the murderous, annihilating illogic that increasingly consumes the globe."
"A voracious approach to fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity...he renders the spectacle of the bombing with a languid, balletic beauty, pitting the unhurried composure of his prose against the violence of the events it describes...Mahajan hasn't lost his sharp comic impulses...[Mahajan's] facility for gorgeous turns of phrase produces many passages of vivid, startling power."
"A singularly intelligent novel."
"A mind-blowing book on many, many levels. The characterisation is extraordinary...A very extraordinary book."
"Even when handling the darkest material or picking through confounding emotional complexities, Mahajan maintains a light touch and a clarity of vision...He is particularly adept at capturing the quicksilver shifts of mood that accompany states of high emotion...Mahajan shows immense perspicacity in his handling of Deepa, and of the other women in the novel...The scenes among the conspirators are captured with self-assurance."
Author Praise
"In this fine novel, Karan Mahajan has achieved a brilliant and distinctive success. The sources, and unbearable, unending, consequences of a terrorist atrocity constitute a subject extremely difficult to capture in a work of serious literature. But with his intelligence, humanity, and art, Mahajan has given us a deep portrait of life in a kind of darkness."
"I can't remember the last time I read a book which conjured a world so rich and so convincing."
"Karan Mahajan is a writer with great command and acute and original insights. He offers what few can: a stereoscopic view of reality in dark, contemporary times."
"The Association of Small Bombs is a wondrous, devastating novel—packed with small wonders of beauty and heartbreak that are impossible to resist."
"Like a Russian novel set in India, Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs has the sweep, wisdom and sensibility of the old masters. Urgent and masterful, this novel shows us how bystander, bomber, victim, and survivor will forever share a patch of scorched ground."
