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 his delight and fear, he becomes embroiled in the lives of one family caught in the undertow of the tragedy, and privy to their secrets. This surprising emotional connection sparks him to confront his own losses. A book of post-9/11 Canada, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao imagines the lasting emotional and political consequences of a real-life act of terror, confronting what we might learn to live with and what we can live without.

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.

ISBN: 9780307356352
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: February 24, 2015

"This often droll, fiercely intelligent novel with its cat's-cradle of a plot challenges the twin deadly lures of religious fundamentalism and racism, revealing the learning and unlearning at the core of the immigrant experience." —Scotiabank Giller Prize jury citation

"Provocative and compelling." —Chatelaine

"This book illuminates the national tragedy of Flight 182 and the ways in which loss change family landscapes." —Toronto Star

"More than a memorial to the victims and the bereaved, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao charts how people navigate their anguish." —The Georgia Straight

"An important book--one that deserves to find international recognition. Pondering our unexamined prejudices might be deeply uncomfortable but it is absolutely necessary." —The Globe and Mail