Clash of cultures

A bleak tale of religious violence in India possesses an underlying optimism.

- HELENA WIŚNIEWSKA BROW

HONOR, by Thrity Umrigar (Swift, $36.99) There's no escaping the horror that underpins Honor, a novel in which two Indian Hindu brothers brutally avenge their sister's marriage to a Muslim man.

It's a horror made all the more real by the timing of this novel's release, 75 years to the month since the partition of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. The 1947 partition, a last-ditch move by the British administration at the end of 300 years of rule, resulted in one of the largest and most deadly mass migrations in human history and a new legacy of religious intolerance in South Asia. To then read Honor in the same week in which Indian-born author Salman Rushdie was stabbed, the target of a decades-old Muslim "fatwa", was doubly chilling.

But Thrity Umrigar's novel is somehow - despite its bleak context - a surprising love story. It is a homage to the author's complex, confounding country of birth, and to the resilience of its people.