Name: The Far Field
ISBN: 9780802128409

Madhuri Vijay

An elegant, epic debut novel--"equal parts love story, war story, and family intrigue" (Ben Fountain)--from an exciting new talent and Pushcart Prize-winner that follows one young woman's search for a lost figure from her childhood, a journey that takes her from Southern India to Kashmir and to the brink of a devastating political and personal reckoning

The Far Field

Heather Margaret

“I had yet to understand just how many shapes a person’s desire could take, and how few of them, in the end, took the shape of the body.”

Please read this book. I love this book and I want more from Madhuri. Her words are powerful, gorgeous and meaningful. Just please put this book on your list to read, it is well worth anyone's time.

Claire Cantlon

Winner of the JCB Prize for Literature 2019. Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019. Shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction) 2019. In the wake of her mother's death, Shalini, a privileged, naive and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote village in Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to track him down. But as soon as Shalini arrives, she is confronted with the region's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. As life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could have dangerous repercussions for the people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay gives a potent critique of Indian politics and class prejudice through the lens of a guileless outsider, while also offering up a profound meditation on grief, guilt and the limits of compassion.

Fraser Simons

Well written, well realized prose and setting, plus I really like structures that leap around in town—but the pacing made it more of a slog than it needed to be.

that ending🙃 the Audiobook narrator is AMAZING by the way.

Amber Laha

This book infuriated me. I don't get why this book was written in the perspective of this self-entitle brat, who clearly learned nothing. Shalini writes a "confession" of what happened 6 years later as a 30-year-old and acknowledges that writing this is about her and assuaging her guilt but has no real way of creating a positive change/or does anything to help those who she negatively affected by being there and actions she took!

She went to find this person from her childhood, creates chaos for multiple people, and leaves back to her privileged life like nothing happened and does nothing to show she learned from what happened and her part that she played in it.

This story would have had more of an impact if we could hear the story from those who were impacted by Shalini's actions, and has to live with the consequences. It would have held more weight and would have more sense as they understand what is going on politically, economically, etc. and the experiences of living through it all.

Megan Rose

** spoiler alert **
           The entire novel was a rollercoaster, but wow, the last 40 pages gutted me.

I think Madhuri is a very talented writers and weaves together some beautiful sentences. I found the following sentences to be especially striking:

“It was not water. It was something else, a material of this world and yet alien. It was sound turned fluid, wind turned liquid, nothingness made into a cool, physical substance, and I let myself fall through it, heavy as a corpse, willing myself never to come up.”

It really captures how intertwined all of the different stories are in the novel and how one move, like breaking the surface of the water or sharing one secret, ripples out and affects everything else.

The Far Field

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