Janika Oza's A History of Burning is a stunning multigenerational saga that follows a family and a community who move during the years 1898 to 1992 from India to Kenya to Uganda, to Canada and the U.K., and beyond. In nearly a dozen voices, Oza's debut novel illuminates immigration patterns and pain alongside familial joys and sorrows.
Readers first meet 13-year-old Pirbhai in Gujarat, India; he is, as the oldest son, fierce with the need to provide for his family. In exchange for a coin and the promise of opportunity, he unwittingly sells himself into labor on the railroad the British are building in East Africa. Pirbhai builds a family and a community with other Indian Africans; his children and grandchildren feel buoyed by the strong ties but sometimes limited by the strictures of tradition and duty. After Ugandan independence, anti-Asian sentiment drives them out of the only country they have known. Pirbhai's son, Vinod, thinks there must be a "third possibility--not African, not Indian, but something beyond borders, an identity forged over decades of scattering apart and, miraculously, finding repair." Each generation struggles in a new place, the tight-knit family always navigating change and searching for a place to call their own. Oza's gorgeous prose is lush with detail--colors, flavors, emotions--and saturated with loveliness and pain, "the messy, the beautiful, the wild improbable light." A History of Burning admirably charts how--by the time Pirbhai's descendants plant seeds in Canadian soil--history, both personal and collective, is formed from the stories we tell and the silences we allow to remain. --Julia Kastner, librarian, teacher and blogger at pagesofjulia