Politics and Prose
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Asha Thanki — A Thousand Times Before
Posted
July 28, 2024
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1,024
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July 28, 2024
1,024
12
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59:08Now PlayingWatch author Asha Thanki's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
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Ayukta is finally sitting down with her wife Nadya to respond to a question she's long avoided: Should they have a child? The decision is complicated by a secret her family has kept for centuries, one that Ayukta will be the first to share with someone outside their bloodline: the women in her family inherit a mysterious tapestry, through which each generation can experience the memories of those who came before her.
Ayukta invites Nadya into this lineage, carrying her through its past. She relives her grandmother Amla's life: Once a happy child in Karachi, Amla migrates to Gujarat during Partition, witnessing violence and loss that forever shape her approach to marriage and motherhood. Amla's daughter, Arni, bears this weight in her own blood in 1974, when gender equity and urban class distinctions divide the community as a bold student movement takes hold. As Ayukta unspools these generations of women--whole decades of love, loss, heartbreak, and revival--she reveals the tapestry's second gift: the ability for each of these women to dramatically reshape their own worlds. Like all power, both fantastic and societal, this inheritance is more treacherous than it seems.
What would it mean, to impart an impossible burden? To withhold these incredible gifts?
Sweeping, deeply felt and intergenerational, A Thousand Times Before is a debut as poetic as it is propulsive, as healing as it is heartbreaking, as it examines what it means to carry our past with us and to pass it on. Rooted in a tender love story, and spun with a tremendous amount of care, this book is a rare, remarkable feat from an incredible new literary talent.
Asha Thanki received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Catapult, Hyphen, and more. She is the winner of the 2019 Arkansas International Emerging Writers Prize and fourth prizewinner of Zoetrope's 2020 Short Fiction Competition. A Kundiman fellow, Asha has received a Randall Kenan Scholarship at Sewanee Writers Conference, Fiction Scholarship with Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature.
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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.
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