A Thousand Times Before

Description

A Thousand Times Before
by Asha Thanki

ISBN: 9780593654644
Hardcover, new

Brief Description:
“A rich family saga about art and memory’s power to inform the present,
make peace with the past, and maybe even alter the future.” — Celeste Ng,
New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts “[Asha] Thanki
reinvents generational memory, conjuring inheritance as a tapestry of love,
trauma, and choices that echo through blood. A profoundly tender and
complex debut that I didn’t want to put down.” — Sequoia Nagamatsu,
bestselling author of How High We Go in the Dark A heartrending family saga
following three generations of women connected by a fantastic tapestry
through which they inherit the experiences of those that lived before them,
sweeping readers from Partition-era India to modern day Brooklyn. 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.