Our City That Year

Winner, English PEN x SALT Award 2025

From the International Booker Prize-winning author-translator duo of Tomb of Sand, comes a powerful, kaleidoscopic novel about a fractured India, caught between rising fundamentalism and waning progressive ideals.

A city teeters on the edge of chaos. A society lies fractured along fault lines of faith and ideology. A playground becomes a battleground. A looming silence grips the public.

Against this backdrop, Shruti, a writer paralysed by the weight of events, tries to find her words, while Sharad and Hanif, academics whose voices are drowned out by extremism, find themselves caught between clichés and government slogans. And there’s Daddu, Sharad’s father, a beacon of hope in the growing darkness. As they each grapple with thoughts of speaking the unspeakable, an unnamed narrator takes on the urgent task of bearing witness.

First published in Hindi in 1998, Our City That Year is a novel that defies easy categorisation. It’s a time capsule, a warning siren, and a desperate plea. Geetanjali Shree’s shimmering prose, in Daisy Rockwell’s nuanced and consummate translation, takes us into a fever dream of fragmented thoughts and half-finished sentences, mirroring the disjointed reality of a city under siege. Readers will find themselves haunted long after the final page, grappling with questions that echo far beyond India’s borders.