WordsWorthy

I completely forgot this last week but in our estimation, Anita Rau Badami's novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? is the finest Canadian work of fiction for 2006, thus the recipient of the fifth annual Words Worthy Award.
It's a stunner of a novel, that tells the story of three women linked by the British-ordered Partition of of India and Pakistan following the Second World War.
At once a story of familial secrets and repercussion's around good intentions, Nighbird is also a novel that addresses simmering tensions between Sikh separatists and the government of then Indian leader Indira Ghandi. Brinkmanship and sporadic violence lead to a terrible endgame that scarred Canada very profoundly and remains unresolved to this day.
The subject of fictions inability to address the complexities of a post 9/11 world has been widely noted, but Badami has done much more here than pen a damn fine third novel
She has adroitly addressed one of the central complexities of our time. Please pick it up.

Posted by Dave