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The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

Literary fiction

The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

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Quick take

A novel that takes us all the way around the bombing, a story about the lives of the victims, the survivors and the bomber. A novel about India that is a novel about the world.

Why I love it

"A good bombing begins everywhere at once." An explosion usually brings with it the urge to run away - to cover and hide - but the second sentence in Karan Mahajan's novel leads us deeper into the devastation instead. Two young sons are killed in a bombing while picking up a television at a Delhi market; their parents struggle with the knowledge that their children died on such a trivial errand. That horrifying balance - the trivial and the tragic - is the source of much of the novel's power.

The bomber is a Kashmiri terrorist disappointed by the results - he wanted a much bigger explosion - and by the time we meet him, we understand we are in a novel that takes us all the way around the bombing, a story about the lives of the victims, the survivors and the bomber. The resulting novel revealed something new to me about how we all live now in an age where the risk of terrorism is a reality of life for billions of people worldwide. A novel about India that is a novel about the world.

By including the terrorists as characters Mahajan insists on their humanity - a humanity they deny in themselves and their victims both - and holds them accountable for their crimes.

"How am I supposed to respond to this thing that has happened to me?" the boys' father asks himself in the days following the bombing. I think this is the question we are all asking: how to live in the face of the knowledge that at any moment we could die or lose those we love to an act of terror? Mahajan has set a heartbreakingly true and daring novel along that powerful topic, one that I think you'll find necessary - a novel that can truly help us understand ourselves, and others, in the dangerous world in which we live.

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Literary fiction
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Intermezzo
The Book of George
Real Americans
Dirty Diana
Wellness
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The God of the Woods
Same As It Ever Was
Annie Bot
Bear
Mercury
True Biz
Family Happiness
The Lady Waiting
The Other Valley
Hard by a Great Forest
Good Material
The Bullet Swallower
Happy All the Time
Rental House
Alice Sadie Celine
Let Us Descend
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Shark Heart
Homeseeking
Transcendent Kingdom
Hello Beautiful
Dominicana
What's Mine and Yours
The Unsettled
Ask Again, Yes
Vladimir
Infinite Country
The Prophets
Normal People
The Verifiers
Salvage the Bones
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
I Have Some Questions for You
Black Buck
The History of Love
Age of Vice
Paper Names
The Light Pirate
The Secret History
The Kite Runner
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Happiness Falls
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The Death of Vivek Oji
The Knockout Queen
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Beautiful World, Where Are You
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