A story inspired by the 1947 partition of India finds twin Hindu boys Shankar and Keshav searching for their mother on a refugee-crowded train station, while a young Sikh girl flees the father who would poison her to protect her from infidels and an elderly Muslim doctor rediscovers new roles as a healer. A first novel. 35,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

As India is rent into two nations, 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 Keshav, twin Hindu boys, lose sight of their mother and join the human mass to go in search of her. A young Sikh girl, Simran Kaur, has run away from her father, who would rather poison his daughter than see her defiled. And Ibrahim Masud, an elderly Muslim doctor driven from the town of his birth, limps towardthe new Muslim state of Pakistan, rediscovering on the way his role as a healer. As the displaced face a variety of horrors, this unlikely quartet comes together, defying every rule of self-preservation to forge a future of hope. - (Baker & Taylor)

In the wake of the 1947 Partition of India, twin Hindu boys search for their mother in a crowded train station, a young girl flees the father who would poison her to protect her from infidels, and a Muslim doctor finds new roles as a healer. - (Baker & Taylor)

A stunning first novel, set during the violent 1947 partition of India, about uprooted children and their journeys to safety

As India is rent into two nations, 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 Keshav, twin Hindu boys, lose sight of their mother and join the human mass to go in search of her. A young Sikh girl, Simran Kaur, has run away from her father, who would rather poison his daughter than see her defiled. And Ibrahim Masud, an elderly Muslim doctor driven from the town of his birth, limps toward the new Muslim state of Pakistan, rediscovering on the way his role as a healer. As the displaced face a variety of horrors, this unlikely quartet comes together, defying every rule of self-preservation to forge a future of hope.

A dramatic, luminous story of families and nations broken and formed, Partitions introduces an extraordinary novelist who writes with the force and lyricism of poetry.

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.

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* That this significantly poignant but never maudlin fictional excursion into relatively recent Asian history is the author's first novel is relevant to mention only because of its nimble use of history, rather than the clumsiness one might expect from a beginning historical novelist. The 1947 independence of the Indian subcontinent and its simultaneous division into the separate countries of India and Pakistan were, in a word, calamitous. Muslims fled to the new Pakistan, and Hindus to the new India, with Sikhs caught somewhere in between, amid ensuing violence that became extreme. Into this turmoil, Majmudar interjects three story lines for a frank but greatly human dramatization of the persecution each religious group experienced at the hands of the others. Two Hindu twins, little boys, search for their mother, whom they lost touch with in the mass exodus to Hindu territory; a teenage girl, a Sikh, flees for her life rather than be murdered by her father, who dreads that his daughter will be abused by marauding forces; and an old Muslim doctor eventually finds light at the end of the horrible tunnel into which his homeland has descended. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.