Author: Shashi Tharoor
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0670049026
Description
Intellectually provocative and emotionally charged, Riot is a novel about the ownership of history, about love, hate, cultural collision, religious fanaticism, and the impossibility of knowing the truth.
Who killed twenty-four-year-old Priscilla Hart? And why would anyone want to murder this idealistic American student who had come to India to volunteer in a women’s health programme? Had her work made a killer out of an enraged husband? Or was her death the result of a xenophobic attack? Was she involved in an indiscriminate love affair that had spun out of control? Or was she simply the innocent victim of a riot that had exploded in that fateful year of 1989 between Hindus and Muslims?
In this long-awaited new novel, Shashi Tharoor experiments brilliantly with narrative form, chronicling the mystery of Priscilla Hart’s death through the often contradictory accounts of a dozen or more characters, all of whom relate their own versions of the events surrounding her killing.