Description

Featuring on BBC2’s Between the Covers TV Book Club presented by Sara Cox

‘Thoroughly accomplished, beautifully written’
Adam Kay, BBC ‘Between the Covers’

‘A magical tale of a troubled family’
Daily Telegraph

Delhi, 1997: It is India’s fiftieth year of independence, the year of Hindu nationalists and atomic bombs. But twelve-year-old Adi has a bigger problem: his Ma has gone missing – again. Left with an ailing grandmother, a raging father and no answers, he finds an unlikely ally: a talking vulture who reveals itself to be a bureaucrat from the ‘Department of Historical Adjustment’. The Department holds Adi’s family files, which will take him on a journey through time and memory, through fifty years of India’s history, uncovering the darkest secrets of his Ma’s past. But first, he must unlock them by facing his greatest fears.

As bright and hopeful as it is devastating, Remember, Mr Sharma explores the ways in which we view the past, its inescapable hold over us and the stories we tell to set ourselves free.

Publisher Review

Charming and endearing . . . There’s a lyricism to A.P. Firdaus’s writing, and I admire how he blends a touch of lightness with the book’s heavier exploration of partition, loss and family tragedy to create a moving story about the past and the shadow it forever leaves on the present — Huma Qureshi, author of Things We Do Not Tell the People We Love Sublime. A wonderful book that employs playful and magical elements in order to explore the past’s hold over the present. A fantastic debut from a promising new literary voice. — Nick Bradley, author of Four Seasons in Japan