Over the last three decades, Kashmir has been ravaged by insurgency. While reams have been written on it – in human rights documents, academic theses, non-fiction accounts of the turmoil, and government and military reports – the effects of the violence on its inhabitants have rarely been rendered in fiction. Feroz Rather’s The Night of Broken Glass corrects that anomaly. Through a series of interconnected stories, within which the same characters move in and out, the author weaves a tapestry of the horror Kashmir has come to represent. His visceral imagery explores the psychological impact of the turmoil on its natives – Showkat, who is made to wipe off graffiti on the wall of his shop with his tongue; Rosy, a progressive, jeans-wearing ‘upper-caste’ girl who is in love with ‘lower-caste’ Jamshid; Jamshid’s father Gulam, a cobbler by profession who never finds his son’s bullet-riddled body; the ineffectual Nadim ‘Pasture’, who proclaims himself a full-fledged rebel; even the barbaric and tyrannical Major S, who has to contend with his own nightmares. Grappling with a society brutalized by the oppression of the state, and fissured by the tensions of caste and gender, Feroz Rather’s remarkable debut is as much a paean to the beauty of Kashmir and the courage of its people as it is a dirge to a paradise lost.

PRAISE

“Feroz Rather’s fierce and lyrical new book of linked stories, with its evocation of Kristallnacht, tells of those everyday lives, forgotten by the west.” — The Guardian

 “Feroz Rather, dealing with subjects of militarization, revenge, and caste, undertakes a daunting task: to write within the landscape of ongoing violence while exposing the other nuances of daily life.”  — Literary Hub 

“The Night of Broken Glass is a work of terrifying and hypnotic beauty. Feroz Rather unsparingly sees through the horrors inflicted on the body and soul of Kashmir. I am reeling from the power and beauty of its sentences.”  — Basharat Peer, author of Curfewed Night 

“An extraordinary, haunting debut. The dazzling characters that inhabit The Night of Broken Glass will stay with you for years after you’ve finished reading this stunning collection. Bravo!” — Mirza Waheed, author of The Collaborator 

“A haunting and mesmerizing debut that announces the arrival of a major new talent.” — Siddhartha Deb, author of The Beautiful and the Damned 

“The Night of Broken Glass offers an insider’s view of the atrocities in Kashmir.”  — Elle Magazine

“In his debut work of fiction, The Night of Broken Glass, Feroz Rather masterfully captures the peculiar, punctured lives of ordinary Kashmiri civilians living under an occupation.” — Johannesburg Review of Book