BLACK Bond Books (Central City Shopping Centre) is holding a book signing event for The Ever After of Ashwin Rao by Padma Viswanathan. This new novel focuses on families on who lost loved ones in the 1985 Air India Bombing. Viswanathan will be in the store signing copies of her book and will make herself available to people affected by the tragedy who want to talk about the book on Saturday, March 29 at 2 p.m. at Black Bond Books, 234 Central City Shopping Centre, Surrey.
BC, V3T 2W1 604-583-1282
From internationally acclaimed New Face of Fiction author Padma Viswanathan comes a stunning new work set among families of those who lost loved ones in the 1985 Air India bombing, registering the unexpected reverberations of this tragedy in the lives of its survivors. A book of post-9/11 Canada, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao demonstrates that violent politics are all too often homegrown in North America but ignored at our peril.
In 2004, almost 20 years after the fatal bombing of an Air India flight from Vancouver, 2 suspects – finally – are on trial for the crime. Ashwin Rao, an Indian psychologist trained in Canada, comes back to do a “study of comparative grief,” interviewing people who lost loved one in the attack. What he neglects to mention is that he, too, had family members who died on the plane. Then, to his delight and fear, he becomes embroiled in the lives of one family caught in the undertow of the tragedy, and privy to their secrets. This surprising emotional connection sparks him to confront his own losses. The Ever After of Ashwin Rao imagines the lasting emotional and political consequences of a real-life act of terror, confronting what we might learn to live with and what we can live without.