An auto-fictional account of a childhood ending in turn-of-the-century India, delivered by an entrancing new voice. When at year’ s end a schoolteacher asks her pupils to write an essay about their vacations over the summer, twelve-year-old Zeenat turns the routine exercise into a daily exploration of her innermost thoughts. It is the dawn of a new millennium, and she’ s coming of age in a politically unstable Mumbai that is still resolutely Bombay to her Muslim community. Though the world beyond her window is full of change, Zeenat spends long hours bored inside her family apartment, preoccupied with the cockroaches under the fridge, the pigeon’ s nest above the cupboard, the shared toilet in the building, and the American shows on TV. At night, she reads English books in the kitchen as she questions where she fits between languages in this post-colonial society. But as summer drags on, the boredom of her routine gives way to anxieties around the place of women in society, the violence that lurks underneath their daily lives, and the anticipation of childhood’ s end.

This is a debut novel by a new, vibrant voice in CanLit.