The Ever After of Ashwin Rao
A national bestseller and finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is 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.
In 2004, almost 20 years after the fatal bombing of an Air India flight from Vancouver that killed 329, two 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 ones in the attack. What he neglects to mention is that he, too, had family members who died on the plane. Then, to…
PADMA VISWANATHAN’s fiction has been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her stories, essays and short translations have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Her translation of the novel São Bernardo, by the Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos, was published in 2020 by New York Review Books. Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, she now divides her time between Montreal, Quebec, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she is Professor of Fiction at the University of Arkansas. She has served as fiction faculty at the Banff Centre, the Vermont Studio Center, Kundiman Asian-American Writers Retreat, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences and the Low-Residency MFA of Fairleigh-Dickinson University. She is married to the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock.