Fireflies in the mist

One woman’s journey through the tumultuous and passionate birth of a new nation. Championed by Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker, Qurratulain Hyder is one of the “must reads” of Indian literature. Fireflies in the Mist is Hyder’s capstone to her astonishing River of Fire, which was hailed by The New York Review of Books as “magisterial with a technical resourcefulness rarely seen before in Urdu fiction.” Fireflies follows the creation of modern day Bangladesh — from Indian province, to Partition, to the emergence of statehood — as told through the impassioned voice of Deepali Sarkar and others around her who live through the turbulence. Hyder perceptively and majestically follows the trajectory of Sarkar’s life — from her secluded upbringing in Dhaka to becoming a socialist rebel and to her ultimate transformation as a diasporic Bengali cosmopolitan — in the way that many of yesterday’s revolutionaries are slowly but surely ensnared within a net of class and luxury dangled in front of them.