A History of Burning: A Novel

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature • Finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for Fiction, the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the 2024 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. • Named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Globe and Mail, CBC Books, Kobo Canada, and 49th Shelf

Four generations. Three sisters. One impossible choice. A profoundly moving debut novel spanning India, Uganda, England, and Canada, about how one act of survival reverberates across generations of a family and their search for a place of their own. Named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Pick, and a most anticipated book of 2023 by the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, OprahDaily, and Goodreads.

India, 1898. Pirbhai is the thirteen-year-old breadwinner for his family when he steps into a dhow on the promise of work, only to be taken across the ocean to labour on the East African Railway for the British. With no money or voice but a strong will to survive, he makes an impossible choice that will haunt him for the rest of his days and reverberate across generations.

Pirbhai’s children go on to thrive in Uganda during the waning days of British colonial rule. As the country moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai’s granddaughters—sisters Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya—come of age in a divided nation, each forging her own path for the future. Latika is an aspiring journalist with a fierce determination to fight for what she believes in. Mayuri’s ambitions will take her farther away from her family than she ever imagined. And fearless Kiya will have to bear the weight of their secrets.

Forced to flee Uganda during Idi Amin’s brutal expulsion of South Asians in 1972, the family must start their lives over again in Toronto. Then one day news arrives that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure a place of their own in the world. 

A masterful and breathtakingly intimate saga of colonialism and exile, complicity and resistance, A History of Burning is a radiant debut about the stories our families choose to share—and those that remain unspoken.

JANIKA OZA is the author of the novel A History of Burning, winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She is the winner of a 2022 O. Henry Award and the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award. She lives in Toronto.

ISBN: 9780771002311
Format: Hardback
Pages: 400
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: May 02, 2023

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature • Finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for Fiction, the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, the 2024 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. • Named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Globe and Mail, CBC Books, Kobo Canada, and 49th Shelf

“Remarkable. . . . A haunting, symphonic tale that speaks to the nuanced complexities of class and trauma for this particular family. . . . This demand—and spirit—for bolder storytelling that transcends borders and identities certainly can be found in Oza’s generous novel. More life, more joy and more love amid a shifting and layered landscape of unspeakable loss. It’s all there—the complicated humanity and grief of Oza’s family of characters—for the reader to consider and behold.”

—New York Times Book Review

“A History of Burning is that rare epic that manages to retain both its sweep and its intimacy. Janika Oza has written a generational saga vivid and alive with sensory and historical detail, an excavation of stories often left untold. There is so much insight here into the aftershocks of colonialism and displacement, the way one generation’s decisions, be they voluntary or compelled or somewhere in between, can reverberate through the ages and change lives yet to be lived. This is a beautiful book, unflinching yet deeply engaged with that most human work, the work of forgiveness.”

—Omar El Akkad, author of American War and What Strange Paradise, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize