When a bomb explodes in a university cafe, nineteen students are killed. The Empty Space begins with the identification of these slain students. Slowly, each individual is claimed and taken away for a proper burial by their mourning family members. The final mother to enter the cafe identifies the nineteenth body as her eighteen-year-old son and brings him home in a casket. She not only brings home her dead son, though, but also the sole survivor of the blast, a three-year-old boy. By a strange quirk of fate, after the explosion he is found lying in a small empty space, alive and breathing. The Empty Space chronicles the memories of the boy dead, the story of the boy brought home, and the cataclysmic crossing of life and death.

Geetanjali Shree is the author of many books, including, Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Premchand and Mai. Nivedita Menon is a writer, translator, and professor in political thought at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

— Sunday Guardian

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