Review by Booklist Review
Oza's debut novel, a family saga spanning four continents and nearly a century, begins in 1898 when Pirbhai, a teenage boy in need of work, naively boards a ship to Africa and ends up as a railroad laborer for the British. With rich details about the plight of Indian migrants in Kenya and Uganda, Oza describes the coolies the British relied on, tradespeople in small towns, government servants in the hierarchical colonial society, and the growing social stability of the Indian diaspora community in East Africa in the early twentieth century. Then, as Pirbhai's descendants are forced to leave Uganda, Oza captures the brutality of Idi Amin's anti-Asian policies and the destruction of the social fabric of the country. As the family struggles to cope with the profound, long-term emotional impact of difficult choices made in times of war and upheaval, Oza dramatizes the intimate psychological repercussions of state actions on a global stage. From India to East Africa, England, and Toronto, Oza's characters experience the heartbreak of departures and arrivals, communities lost and rebuilt. This striking epic combines powerful characters of different generations, compelling storytelling, dramatic settings and conflicts, and thoughtful explorations of displacement and belonging, family ties, citizenship, loyalty, loss, and resilience.
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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Oza's impressive debut spans four continents and five generations of an Indian family as they're forced to migrate again and again for political and economic reasons. In 1898, 13-year-old Pirbhai, the oldest son of a poor family in western India, heads out to find work. He's conscripted to a railroad builder in Kenya, where he labors for several years. After the project is finished, he lucks into a job at a store run by an Indian family and later marries their eldest daughter, Sonal. The couple then moves to Uganda to work at a pharmacy. In 1972, Pirbhai's son Vinod and his wife and three daughters, who have sunk roots into Uganda, are exiled by Idi Amin, with most of the family moving to Toronto, before their lives are disrupted again by the 1992 racial uprising. In chapters alternating between the many characters' points of view, Oza builds momentum toward a denouement involving a letter from Vinod's lost daughter in Uganda. Though the format doesn't allow for much character development, Oza neatly sets her characters' lives within the context of broader political and economic movements, showing how historical circumstances determine their individual destinies as much as the choices of their forebears. Though it can be tiring, this broad and colorful portrait has plenty of impressive moments. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Four generations of an Indian family struggle with displacement in this debut novel. Artfully juggling the perspectives of 10 characters over the span of nearly a century, Oza follows the members of an ordinary family from India to Africa to Canada as they struggle to maintain their cultural traditions and solidarity amid an often hostile environment and changing social norms. Pirbhai, the patriarch, is lured to Africa as a 13-year-old in 1898, where he's pressed into indentured servitude laying track for the British railway to Lake Victoria. His fateful decision to obey an order to set fire to a village the British wanted gone provides the novel's title and looms over his descendants as a sort of original sin. After he moves from Kenya to Uganda, his family slowly climbs the economic ladder into the middle class until the moment in 1972 when the dictator Idi Amin orders the expulsion of all Asians. When Arun, an anti-government activist, disappears following his arrest, his wife, Latika, Pirbhai's granddaughter, allied with her husband in the struggle against the repressive regime, chooses to remain behind rather than joining her parents, siblings, and her own infant son on their journey to Toronto and the beginning of a new life in yet another alien land. The family's fears about her fate give birth to a secret that will reverberate in their lives decades later. Oza subtly observes the shift from practices like arranged marriages to unions that are the product of romantic attachments and trusts her readers to acclimate themselves. In intimate domestic scenes and scenes of societies in turmoil, she displays a sure-handed ability to write at both small and large scale and to portray with deep sympathy the universal human desire to find "a little place to simply exist, freely, and with dignity." An ambitious family drama skillfully explores the bonds of kinship and the yearning for peace and security. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.