The Association of Small Bombs

Reviews / Votes

Wonderful. It is smart, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout * New York Times * A superb novel... Mahajan inhabits two sides of a divided India * Financial Times * Extraordinary... A mind-blowing book on many, many levels * BBC Radio 4 * A voracious approach to fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity * New Yorker * In Mahajan's riveting, intricate story, the aftershocks of small bombs are as inescapable as their explosions -- Alex Traub * Vice Magazine * Engrossing... looks at the after-effects of tragedy from the perspective of the victims, survivors and perpetrators -- Sarah Gilmartin * Irish Times * Wonderful... smart, devastating, unpredictable and enviably adept in its handling of tragedy and its fallout. If you enjoy novels that happily disrupt traditional narratives - about grief, death, violence, politics - I suggest you go out and buy this one. Post haste... thrilling, tender and tragic... generous without prejudice, which feels at once subversive and refreshing -- Fiona Maazel * The New York Times Book Review * An utterly brilliant book. Rarely does one encounter a work as masterful in the precision of its writing or as penetrating in the insights it provides. Karan Mahajan is a writer to be admired. -- Kevin Powers Karan Mahajan's thoughtful, touching and perfectly pitched account of two marketplace bombings and the casual havoc they cause in a handful of Delhi families is almost subversive in its even-handedness and its charity. For all its unflinching - and unnerving - fatalism, The Association of Small Bombs is an unusually wise, tender, and generous novel. -- Jim Crace A voracious approach to fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity... he renders the spectacle of the bombing with a languid, balletic beauty, pitting the unhurried composure of his prose against the violence of the events it describes... Mahajan hasn't lost his sharp comic impulses... [Mahajan's] facility for gorgeous turns of phrase produces many passages of vivid, startling power -- Alexandra Schwartz * The New Yorker *