When a billionaire hotelier and political operator attempts to pit his three daughters against one another, a brutal struggle for primacy begins in this modern-day take on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Set in contemporary India, where rich men are gods while farmers starve and water is fast running out, We That Are Young is a story about power, status, and the love of a megalomaniac father. A searing exploration of human fallibility, Preti Taneja’s remarkable novel reveals the fragility of the human heart—and its inevitable breaking point.

We That Are Young: A novel

Literature & Fiction

Taneja, Preti

Literary

KNOPF

Dramas & Plays

Vintage

Kumkum Malhotra (New Fictions)

Gatehouse Press

We That Are Young Mrexp

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Random House USA Ex

Money, power, corruption, and desire. Unimaginable wealth. Unspeakable hardship. A family divided. When Jivan Singh to his childhood home after a long absence, it's only to witness the unexpected resignation of Devraj, the founding father of the Company, a vast corporation at the heart of Indian life. On the same day, Devraj's youngest daughter Sita absconds-refusing to submit to marriage. Her older sisters Radha and Gargi are handed their father's company.... So begins a vicious struggle for power, ranging from the luxury hotels of new Delhi and Amritsar, the Palaces and slums of Napurthala, to the beautiful, broken city of Srinagar, Kashmir. We That Are Young is a modern-day King Lear that bursts with energy and fierce, beautifully measured rage. It presents a startling insight into modern India, the rise of religious nationalism, the clash of youth and age, the intensity of life (and the ever-present spectre of death) in one of the world's fastest growing economies. It is the tragedy of our times - for all time.

We That Are Young

Galley Beggar Press

"Stunning... poetic, urgent. [Taneja] turns a critical lens toward the way language shapes violence, suggesting that 'power tells a story to sustain itself, it has no empathy for those it harms.'"--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offenses at age 20, and sent to high-security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for one day, to attend an event marking the fifth anniversary of a prison education program he participated in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers' Hall, some of whom he knew. Then he went to the restroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists. That day, he killed two people: Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt. Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Merritt oversaw her program; Khan was one of her students. "It is the immediate aftermath," Taneja writes. "'I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh.' The I is not only mine. It belongs to many." In this searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, she draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition. Aftermath is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

Aftermath (Undelivered Lectures)

Essays & Correspondence

Transit Books

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