With the assurance, the mastery of vivid detail, and the ear for the nuances of the voice that have garnered him such admiration, Vassanji weaves twelve haunting tales of lives transplanted, of the traumas small and large of migration, of the bitterness of memory and the unexpected consequences of hope. Meeting his college friend Rusty after years, Diamond is faced once again with a past he had chosen to outgrow and forget. Haunted by the memory of his wife’s betrayal, he finds himself trapped in Rusty’s world, his shrine to Elvis. As he struggles to escape from this unnatural prison, Diamond finds help from an unexpected ally. In When She Was Queen a young man questions his mother about a rumour that has circulated amongst his older siblings for years: that their father once lost their mother in a poker game. According to the rumour, their mother spent a night in the bed of a local magnate. In his quest to comprehend the implications of this rumour, the narrator uncovers an even darker secret. A young African-born Indian visits his ancestral village in drought-stricken Gujarat in search of a wife, and discovers instead an unexpected destiny in The Expected One. Negotiating between her past and her present in Her Two Husbands, the widow of a university professor finds herself increasingly a prisoner of the edicts of her new husband’s spiritual advisor. On Halloween night an insulted man lays bare his horrifying plan of revenge in Is It Still October. And in She, with Bill and George’ a young Indian woman forms unlikely bonds with two men-one American, the other Masai-in 1970s Tanzania that reverberate through her life. Quiet and composed, penetrating and startling, Elvis, Raja: Stories is a portrait of an increasingly modern condition, of lives caught in our swiftly changing, often contradictory world.
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