Partitions - by Amit Majmudar & Majmudar (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"Unforgettable." --Boston Globe

As India is rent into two nations with the creation of Pakistan, communal violence breaks out on both sides of the new border and streaming hordes of refugees flee from blood and chaos.

At an overrun train station, Shankar and Kenshav, twin Hindu boys, lose sight of their mother and go in search of her. A young Sikh girl, Simran Kaur, has run away from her father who would rather poison her than see her defiled. And Ibrahim Masud, an elderly Muslim doctor, limps toward the new Muslim state of Pakistan, rediscovering on the way his role as a healer. A dramatic, luminous story of families and nations broken and formed, Partitions, "written with piercing beauty, alive with moral passion and sorrowful insight, [is] a rueful masterpiece" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Review Quotes

"A superb fiction debut ... particularly welcome. This novel will make you angry and sad, as it should; it will also leave you with a heightened sense of sympathy and hope for all people on both sides of an arbitrary border." --The Wall Street Journal

"Unforgettable." --The Boston Globe

"Heart-wrenching." --New York Post

"Shimmering prose... and a poignant surprise ending." --The Seattle Times

"This first-time novelist has helped us to travel that brief but crucial distance, from words on the page to dreams in our minds and hearts, and made this bitter, brutal time somehow reachable." --NPR, All Things Considered

"Eloquently shares its author's humane insights... A worldly meditation on the violence that occurs because of the necessary yet artificial partitions between individuals." --San Francisco Chronicle

"A dazzling narrative... Amit Majmudar's exceptional debut brilliantly captures India at its most turbulent." --Daily Mail (UK)

"A greatly human dramatization of the persecution each religious group experienced at the hands of the others... Poignant but never maudlin." --Booklist (starred review)

"Magnificent... Written with piercing beauty, alive with moral passion and sorrowful insight--a rueful masterpiece." --Kirkus (starred review)

About the Author

Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist and an award-winning poet whose work has been featured in The Best American Poetry 2007. His first poetry collection, 0°, 0°, was published in 2009, and a novella, Azazel, was serialized in The Kenyon Review. Partitions is his first full-length novel. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.