A Burning

Written By Linda Malek
burning.JPG

A Burning by @megha.maj
Reviewed by Linda
📙📙📙

Many thanks to @simonschusteruk for sending us this ARC!

Politically charged, captivating hearts and minds, this debut novel by Majumdar suspends the reader in the most harrowing of circumstances from page 1. Our wrongly accused protagonist and young Muslim woman, Jivan, is chewed up and spit out by Indian society following an act of "free speech" on Facebook.

Except in Jivan's contemporary India, it is her caste and status that determines the projection of her voice, and her freedom of speech is promptly sedated by corruption.
With the government looking for a scapegoat for their mishandling of a terrorist train bombing in Bengal, Jivan at 22 is arrested with her ambitions to provide for her family and make something of herself, destroyed.

What happened to all of the credible witnesses? Or the testimonials from acquaintances near and far? Majumdar draws in two additional characters, PT Sir, Jivan's former teacher, and Lovely, a budding actress.

I learned later that the meaning of Jivan is, ironically, life. And at either side of Life, both PT Sir and Lovely take opposite stands to testify - the respective tastes of power and money great enough to put their consciences to sleep.

Remarkable and compelling, Majumdar shows how to create a colossal story in the simplest of ways.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

Previous

Loud Black Girls
Next

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous