Riot - Softcover

Shashi Tharoor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143030906 ISBN 13: 9780143030904

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2003

Synopsis

Who killed twenty-four-year-old Priscilla Hart? And why would anyone want to murder this highly motivated, idealistic American student who had come to India to volunteer in women’s health programs? Had her work make a killer out of an enraged husband? Or was her death the result of a xenophobic attack? Was she involved in an indiscriminate love affair that had spun out of control? Had a disgruntled, deeply jealous colleague been pushed to the edge? Or was she simply the innocent victim of a riot that had exploded in that fateful year of 1989 between Hindus and Muslims?

In his long-awaited new novel, Shashi Tharoor, the acclaimed author of The Great Indian Noveland Show Business,whom the Independent(London) called "one of the finest novelists writing in English today," once again triumphs. Experimenting masterfully with narrative form, he chronicles the mystery of Priscilla Hart’s death through the often contradictory accounts of a dozen or more characters, all of whom relate their own versions of the events surrounding her killing. Like his two previous novels, Riotprobes and reveals the richness of India, and is at once about love, hate, cultural collision, the ownership of history, religious fanaticism, and the impossibility of knowing the truth.

In plot, style, and characterization, Shashi Tharoor’s latest novel is a brilliant tour de force.

About this title

About the Author:

Shashi Tharoor was born in London and brought up in Bombay and Calcutta. A winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize, he is the author of six books including the novels Riot, Show Business,and The Great Indian Novel,and India: From Midnight to the Millennium.He is also the author of numerous articles, op-ed pieces, and reviews in such publications as the New York Times,the Washington Post,the International Herald Tribune,the Times of India,the Indian Express,and Foreign Affairs.Mr. Tharoor is a senior United Nations official and he lives in New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

The death of an American woman in India serves as the pretext for a thoughtful, sociologically precise novel about the religious tensions racking the subcontinent. On September 30, 1989, in a riot that erupts in the town of Zalilgarh, east of New Delhi, 24-year-old Priscilla Hart, a volunteer with a population control organization, is stabbed to death. A few weeks later, Priscilla's divorced parents, Katharine and Rudyard Hart, travel to Zalilgarh to pick up her effects and to find out what happened. Tharoor divides the book into accounts devoted to the various actors, American and Indian, who played parts in Priscilla's fatal stay in Zalilgarh. From Priscilla's letters and diaries, we get a sense of the classic American sensibility, a la Daisy Miller that mix of naivete and sexual experience so puzzling to the rest of the world. Priscilla has a difficult affair with the married district magistrate, V. Lakshman, meeting him for trysts at a ruin outside town. Lakshman, the graduate of a highly selective Indian college, St. Stephens, has a penchant for Wilde, but he is bound to Indian tradition, and listens when his friend, police chief and fellow St. Stephens alumnus Gurinder Singh, emphasizes that, in Indian eyes, Priscilla is incurably promiscuous. Framing this love affair is the mounting tension between Muslims and the followers of Ram Charan Gupta, who want to destroy a local mosque and put up a Hindu temple on its site. Katharine and Rudyard Hart, accompanied by reporter Randy Diggs, never find all the clues to Priscilla's death Gurinder has quietly given Lakshman Priscilla's scrapbook. Tharoor's story is about a larger topic than the undoing of one innocent American it is about the potential fragmentation of the secular Indian republic, a tragedy in the making. Agent, Mary Evans. 30,000 first printing; 6-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0143030906
• ISBN 13: 9780143030904
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 272