Riot

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 1987 between Hindus and Muslims?

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. 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.