4.5/5 stars: OUR CITY THAT YEAR is an absorbing look into the intense Hindu-Muslim religious strife that develops in a city in India. Focusing on one household—Hanif, an academic, along with his wife, Shruti, his colleague, Sharaf, and Sharaf’s father, Daddu—the narrative mostly consists of their conversations, anxieties, and arguments as the city becomes consumed by escalating tensions, Hindu nationalism, and departmental politics at the university where Hanif and Sharaf work.

The way the voices float into and out of the text, along with the reporter-like voice of the unnamed narrator, give it an almost disembodied feel (which makes the audiobook, narrated by Deepti Gupta, work particularly well), contrasting with the very bodily consequences of extremist violence. The novel shows how passivity can become complacency, which can morph into complicity, which can transform into more sinister ideology…and how moderate liberal intellectuals who think their lives won’t be touched by religious extremism can descend into its grips. Originally published in 1998 but newly out in the U.S. with an English translation, OUR CITY THAT YEAR is a more accessible work than Shree’s IB-winning THE TOMB OF SAND, and one I would recommend to readers interested explorations of how ordinary people respond to an increasingly fractured, extremist society (sound timely?).