The bustling streets and shops of Bangalore the insularity and tensions of military-occupied Kishtwar a struggling remote village against a backdrop of spectacular mountains - all are brought to life with startling clarity.
Madhuri Vijay’s prose is elegant and understated, and she does such an amazing job of evoking the sights, sounds and smells of each locale in vivid detail, that it’s almost like being there. But while she seeks to unravel the events that led to her mother’s death, Shalini’s presence sparks danger for the local residents. Shalini is searching for a man who had disappeared from her mother’s life years before.
The Far Field follows Shalini, a young woman who is adrift and grieving after her mother’s death, as she journeys from her comfortable home in urban Bangalore to a Kashmiri mountain village. Winner of the 2019 JCB Prize for Indian Literature With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt, and the limits of compassion. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him.
In the wake of her mother's death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Gorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize-winner Madhuri Vijay's The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present.
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