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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.

This review originally ran in the May 5, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: family, historical fiction, Shelf Awareness |