| Vendor | |
|---|---|
|
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
THIS RED LINE GOES STRAIGHT TO YOUR HEART
Graced the best of summer lists from the CBC, the Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail.
In 1947 a red line was drawn across the map of Punjab, creating India and Pakistan, and displacing millions through forced migration. The catastrophes that followed reverberated around the world and through generations.
Madhur Anand's masterful memoir begins with her father's story, pre-Partition. He's a man off balance, the one in a thousand afflicted by polio and partially paralyzed as a result. On the opposite side of that red line is her mother, chanting Hey Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage.
In alternating voices, Anand recreates their migrations: fleeing from ancestral homes in 1947, facing adolescence at the foothills of the Himalayas post-Independence, finalizing an arranged marriage in Delhi in 1967 shortly after the Green Revolution takes hold, landing in Montreal during Expo67, raising their children in mining towns, on Indigenous reservations, and in crowded city apartments. Then we see the impact of that disruption in Anand's own life, as everything about the human condition is revealed to be asymmetric, even the lines on palms from which destiny may be read. The poetry of memory is woven together with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present. This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart defies form and convention (as Michael Ondaatje did in Running in the Family) to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.
MADHUR ANAND's internationally acclaimed collection A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and named one of ten all-time trailblazing poetry collections by the CBC. She is an internationally recognized ecologist with a Ph.D. in Theoretical Ecology whose award-winning prose has been published in various magazines.
Madhur Anand's masterful memoir begins with her father's story, pre-Partition. He's a man off balance, the one in a thousand afflicted by polio and partially paralyzed as a result. On the opposite side of that red line is her mother, chanting Hey Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage.
In alternating voices, Anand recreates their migrations: fleeing from ancestral homes in 1947, facing adolescence at the foothills of the Himalayas post-Independence, finalizing an arranged marriage in Delhi in 1967 shortly after the Green Revolution takes hold, landing in Montreal during Expo67, raising their children in mining towns, on Indigenous reservations, and in crowded city apartments. Then we see the impact of that disruption in Anand's own life, as everything about the human condition is revealed to be asymmetric, even the lines on palms from which destiny may be read. The poetry of memory is woven together with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present. This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart defies form and convention (as Michael Ondaatje did in Running in the Family) to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.
MADHUR ANAND's internationally acclaimed collection A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and named one of ten all-time trailblazing poetry collections by the CBC. She is an internationally recognized ecologist with a Ph.D. in Theoretical Ecology whose award-winning prose has been published in various magazines.
| Available products |
|---|
|
Book
Published 2020-06-01 by Strange Light |