Tomb of Sand

In northern India, an 80-year old woman takes to her bed after her husband dies. Her children try to bring her back to their land of the living, but she is tired of being the breath they all breathe.

Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and I bought a copy because I haven’t read much Indian literature and wanted to support the independent publisher Tilted Axis Press, as well as read more books by women writing in a non-European language translated by women.

This is a big book, in more ways than one. It is 735 pages long and deals with the nature of tradition and convention, the position of women in patriarchal societies, the borders that exist everywhere, who polices them and whether the barriers they represent are insurmountable. It explores one woman’s experience of Partition and the immediate impact the separation of India and Pakistan had as well as its long reach into the 21st century. It considers family structures and the unspoken rivalries and power plays within them. It examines what it is to be a woman of a certain age whose body is changing in ways that feel like an entirely new person is squatting in her brain. And it talks about the tension between humans and the rest of nature and how our species would do well to listen better to those that have evolved differently to us.