Critics' Opinion:
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Published Mar 2020
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Set in modern India, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife.
Based on the author's own experience of marriage, soon the newly-wed experiences extreme violence at her husband's hands and finds herself socially isolated. Intellectual and physical cruelty is explored. Yet hope keeps her alive. Writing becomes her salvation, a supreme act of defiance and, as the subtitle suggests, the novel is also about the act of writing itself and the way that fiction and stories can help you escape.
Though a harrowing story, Kandasamy's writing is also funny, tender, and lyrical. When I Hit You is smart, fierce, and courageous.
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018
Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2018
Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2018
"Kandasamy's brilliant and at times brutally funny narrator leads the reader through her emotional journey...This is a story that could take place in any culture at any time period. What makes this novel unique is the feisty voice of the narrator and the rich details of her intellectual interests and her husband's leftist politics in contemporary India." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] brutal, essential narrative of marital abuse and survival...This visceral and sophisticated account is both terrifying and triumphant." - Publishers Weekly
"Explosive...Meena Kandasamy's vivid, sharp and precise writing makes a triumph of When I Hit You." - The Guardian
This information about When I Hit You was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator, and activist who lives in Chennai and London. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch and Ms. Militancy, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Gypsy Goddess. This is her second novel.
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