'' Tomb of Sand'' (originally titled ''Ret Samadhi'', hi, रेत समाधि) is a 2018

Hindi Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...

-language novel by Indian author

Geetanjali Shree Geetanjali Shree ( hi, गीतांजलि श्री; born 12 June 1957), also known as Geetanjali Pandey, is an Indian Hindi-language novelist and short-story writer based in New Delhi, India. She is the author of several short stories ...

. It was translated into

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

by U.S. translator Daisy Rockwell. In 2022, the book became the first novel translated from an Indian language to win the

International Booker Prize The International Booker Prize (formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize) is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize was announced ...

Plot

The book traces the transformative journey of 80-year-old Ma, who becomes depressed after the death of her husband. She then decides to travel to

Pakistan Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 243 million people, and has the world's second-lar ...

, confronting trauma that had remained unresolved since she was a teenager who survived the Partition riots. The story is fictional.

Critical reception

The novel received praise from book critics in India and elsewhere. Writing in ''

The Hindu ''The Hindu'' is an Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It began as a weekly in 1878 and became a daily in 1889. It is one of the Indian newspapers of record and the secon ...

'', reviewer Mini Kapoor described it as "a stunningly powerful story about stories that never end". Novelist

Alka Saraogi Alka Saraogi ( hi, अलका सरावगी; born 17 November 1960) is an Indian novelist and short story writer in the Hindi language. She is a recipient of the 2001 Sahitya Akademi Award for Hindi for her novel ''Kalikatha: Via Bypass' ...

, writing in '' The Book Review'', praised the novel for "its sweeping imagination and sheer power of language, unprecedented and uninhibited".

Frank Wynne Frank Wynne (born 1962) is an Irish literary translator and writer. Born in County Sligo in the west of Ireland, he worked as a comics editor at Fleetway and later at comic magazine '' Deadline''. He worked for a time at AOL before becoming a ...

, chair of the 2022 International Booker judges, said it was "enormously engaging and charming and funny and light, despite the various subjects it’s dealing with". He added that Rockwell's translation was "stunningly realised, the more so because so much of the original depends on wordplay, on the sounds and cadences of Hindi".

Accolades

In addition to winning the International Booker Prize in its English translation, the French translation (''Ret Samadhi, au-delà de la frontière'':

Éditions des Femmes Éditions des Femmes is a French feminist publishing house that was launched in 1972, mainly by women of the collective Psychoanalysis and Politics led by Antoinette Fouque, with other activists of the MLF, and funded by the patron Sylvina Boissonna ...

, Paris, 2020; tr. Annie Montaut) was shortlisted for the 2021 Émile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature.

References

External links

*: Rajkamal Prakashan (Hindi) *: Tilted Axis Press (English) *: Penguin Books India (English) 2018 Indian novels Novels set in India Novels set in Pakistan Hindi-language novels International Booker Prize-winning works Fictional books Partition of India in fiction {{2010s-novel-stub