Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2013
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
On November 1st 1984, a day after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, a nineteen-year-old student travels back from a class trip with his mentor and chemistry teacher, Professor Singh. As the group disembark at Delhi station a mob surrounds the professor, throws a tire over him, douses him in gasoline and sets him alight.
Years later the student, Raj, is compelled to find his professor's widow, the beautiful Nelly. As the two walk through the misty mountains of Shimla, Nelly comes up against a nation in denial, Raj faces the truth about his father's role in the Sikh massacre and they both find the path leads back to the train station. Jaspreet Singh crafts an affecting and important story of a largely untouched moment in Indian memory.
"An indictment of the terrrible events of November, 1984, the book teases out the complicated intersection of family, love, politics, and hate, and how one man confronts the responsibility and guilt of one of the worst times in his nation's history." - Publishers Weekly
"An elegy to the beauty of Kashmir, written with a sinuous elegance." - The Times (UK)
"Inventive, melancholy, and unflinchingly courageous." - Siddhartha Deb, author of The Beautiful and the Damned
"A poignant and devastating depiction of how silencing fails to annul complicity." - Daphne Marlatt, recipient of the 2012 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award
"Just like the noble gas that pervades our universe, extremes of inhumanity pervade the lives of all those touched by them. In Helium, Jaspreet Singh evokes, with striking images and prose that honors W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Primo Levi, the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in India. It is a feat of chemistry, but also of alchemy, for Singh transforms the seemingly ineffable - the enduring chaos engendered by mob violence - into a work of fiction both beguiling and lyrical." - Taras Grescoe, author of The Devil's Picnic and Straphanger
This information about Helium was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jaspreet Singh was born in Punjab, and brought up in Kashmir and in several cities in India. He is a former research scientist with a PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University, Montreal. His debut short-story collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, won the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize. Chef, his first novel, won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was shortlisted for four awards including the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. He lives in Toronto.
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