Indians dominate DSC Prize Longlist

Works of 13 Indian authors, including a writer duo, figure in the longlist of 16 titles for the 2012 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature announced today.

Manhad Narula, Ira Pande and Surina Narula at the
announcement of the DSC Prize

The longlist for the USD 50,000 award was chosen from 52 entries which were reviewed by a five-member jury comprising chairperson Ira Pande, Alastair Niven (UK), Fakrul Alam (Bangladesh), Faiza S Khan (Pakistan) and Marie Brenner (US).

The longlisted books include an interesting mix of established as well debut novelists, along with three translated entries, the jury said.

Among the prominent Indian authors longlisted for their works are Manu Joseph (Serious Men), Usha K R (Monkey-man), Tabish Khair (The Thing About Thugs) and Kishwar Desai (Witness the Night).

Commenting on the longlist, Pande said, "This list is an interesting mix of 16 titles chosen after a careful consideration of various styles, languages and subject matter. It reflects the best of the South Asian literary tradition - a wide landscape of rural and urban life, intricate rituals of story-telling and an indication of its evolving form.

"This is the East, seen as it is by some of the most promising novelists of Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India, and as it appears to those who live elsewhere."

Full report here Outlook

Author mixes disaster, diversity in novel

The year 2005 will forever be remembered by residents of the Gulf Coast as the year of natural disasters. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina had caused colossal damage to New Orleans, many Houston residents participated in a massive and chaotic evacuation as Hurricane Rita threatened to repeat Katrina’s destruction.

Sugar Land resident and author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was one of the unlucky few who participated in the mass exodus. While caught up in the hours of stop-and-go traffic, Divakaruni paid special attention to the way people were interacting, both good and bad. Surprised by the humanity and willingness of strangers to help others, Divakaruni used the events as inspiration for her latest novel, One Amazing Thing.

“I started thinking about being in the whole crisis situation, which you couldn’t control. A crisis situation where you especially feel trapped with a group of people you don’t know,” Divakaruni said. “What happens to us in such situations? Is it possible to rise above our fear and panic and create a community to help each other?”

Full report here Yourfortbendnews

Move over, men!

Writing was never regarded as a women’s forte. Yet, mainstream literature has been known to be silently nudged by the saintly articulations of Akka Mahadevi, Mirabai or Lal Ded in the past. It was during the national movement in India that many writers put down their experiences in the spirit of social reform. The women writers associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement, in particular, such as Rashid Jehan and Ismat Chugtai are well known for having taken up social issues that affected the lives of women. But women have always had to work from the peripheries to snatch, as it were, this position in society.

Vermillion Clouds: A Century of
Women’s Stories from Bengal
Translated by Radha Chakravarty
Women Unlimited; Pp 231; Rs 350

Through the ages, short stories have found an affinity with women writers: the illustrious names of Swarnakumari Devi, Indira Devi, Anurupa Devi and Nirupama Devi cannot be brushed aside. Although no one can forget the remarkable contribution of its pioneers, lately many women writers have taken to writing short stories such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Vandana Singh, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Nair, Ginu Kamani and a host of others who write in regional languages in the Indian literary landscape. Radha Chakravarty has done well to translate lesser known Bengali short story writers and give them visibility in this anthology.

Most of these stories possess a naiveté that we might even call an artlessness, which is not surprising considering the time period they were written in. Early women writers lacked the art of constructing an arresting plot coupled with crisp writing, the methods of developing central characters, novel subject matter, or the subtle suspense of a denoument that make for "good" story telling.

Full report here Tribune

REVIEW: One Amazing Thing

review
One Amazing Thing 
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Penguin / Hamish Hamilton
Rs 450
Pp 224
ISBN: 9780670084524
Hardback

Blurb
A group of nine are trapped in the visa office at an Indian Consulate after a massive earthquake in an American city. Two visa officers on the verge of an adulterous affair; Jiang, a Chinese–Indian woman in her last years; her gifted teenage granddaughter Lily; an ex-soldier haunted by guilt; Uma, an Indian–American girl bewildered by her parents’ decision to return to Kolkata after twenty years; Tariq, a young Muslim man angry with the new America; and an enraged and bitter elderly white couple. As they wait to be rescued—or to die—they begin to tell each other stories, each recalling ‘one amazing thing’ in their life, sharing things they have never spoken of before. Their tales are tragic and life-affirming, revealing what it means to be human and the incredible power of storytelling.

Reviews
Games people play Business Standard
The Mistress of Spices, Divakaruni’s first book, seemed low on zest. But its unfair to pigeonhole anyone on the basis of one encounter, so when this latest arrived from the publisher, I decided to renew the acquaintance.

The one interesting thing about this book (‘amazing’ is a special word and one that should not be used lightly) is that it is, or sets out to tell, a different story.

A motley group of people (all hoping to travel to India) are trapped in the visa section of the Indian consulate in an American city following an earthquake. As time wears on and chances of escape or rescue look bleak, one of them decides that they should ‘focus their minds on something compelling’ and tell an important story from their lives, ‘one amazing thing’ that has made a difference or made them who they are. 

So unfold stories by the visa officer Mangalam, his colleague Malathi, an estranged American couple, Tariq, an angry young Muslim man, Jiang, a Chinese-Indian woman returning to Kolkata… the characters are stereotypical but their stories are interesting, if on a basic level.

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Various kinds of life, and the different turns that they take Asian Age
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a master storyteller. In One Amazing Thing, a collection of short stories woven into a single tapestry, her weave is seamless, possessing an almost flawless fluidity. What is overridingly attractive is that just as in her earlier book Palace of Illusions — which was certainly “an amazing thing” — she is unpretentious, never attempting to be clever.

Her craft lacks the jarring in-your-face quality that many “intellectual” writers are prone to. The nine stories unravel at a rhythmic pace, and each protagonist comes vividly alive.
An earthquake traps nine people in the Indian visa office in an American city. The focus is naturally on a collective struggle to survive. There’s little food, and later the office begins to flood. At a moment when the psychological and emotional stress begins to wear them down, a young graduate student Uma, who has been reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and who helps hold the collection together, suggests that each tell a personal tale, “one amazing thing” from their lives, which they have never told before. As their stories of self-discovery unfold in the situation they are in, not knowing whether they will come out alive or dead, their lives flash before them and they tell strangers their innermost secrets.

Acts of self-redemption

Twister meets Canterbury Tales as a group of hitherto strangers are trapped in a room in the aftermath of a quake. Unwillingly, they are drawn into each other's tales and lives.US-based author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores the unities among the differing strands of human lives in her latest novel, One Amazing Thing. 

The genesis of One Amazing Thing was your engagement with the survivors of  Hurricane Katrina, and the experience you yourself had to undergo during Hurricane Rita in Houston. How did the two shape the 
novel?
When I was volunteering with Hurricane Katrina refugees in 2005, I noticed that some of the people I worked with were angry or devastated. But others were able to maintain calm, or even joke about things. I kept asking myself, Why? Why some and not the others? A few weeks later, I was experiencing a similar
situation first hand - Hurricane Rita was coming through Houston, and we were asked to evacuate. As we sat on the freeway late into the night, paralysed by traffic and wondering what would happen to us, I saw how the pressure brought out the worst in some people and the best in others. Some were toting guns, snarling
at people; others were sharing their meagre supplies of water and snacks. That’s when I knew I’d have to write about this phenomenon.
In One Amazing Thing, we see this split in the characters once they are trapped by an earthquake. Some, like Tariq, the young Muslim American, is furious. When Cameron, the ex-soldier, stops him from opening a door that might cause the building to collapse, he is ready to kill Cameron. Others, like Lily, the sulky goth-punk teenager, risks her life to save a character buried under rubble.

One Amazing Thing is, in a way, a departure from your earlier works: it has a divergent composition of characters. Was such a composition essential to the narrative?
Very much so. This is a novel that examines whether a community can be built and whether true communication is possible, through storytelling, from a group of strangers who have nothing in common (or so do they think) except a desire to go to India. To make this truly effective, I had to create characters who were
different in terms of race, age and religion. One Amazing Thing is made up of Indians, Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Caucasians, and an African American. They are Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, and agnostic. Their ages range from the 70s to 13.

How tough was it to make each of the nine individuals’ story almost equally compelling?
Very difficult - and they probably aren’t equal. Readers are always telling me which one their favourite story is (and sometimes, which one isn’t!)

How important for you was the central conceit’s link with India?
It was very important. India has always been important to all my books - and to me. In this novel, I wanted to explore many different reasons why people want to go to India - to reconnect with family, to find a mate, to escape from a post-9/11 America, to run away, to find redemption.

The characters, while recounting their follies, foibles and frailties, are engaged in an act of self-redemption through their stories.

Any influences, apart from Chaucer?
In addition to The Canterbury Tales (which appears in my novel) and Wuthering Heights, I was drawing on works such as The Decameron, The Arabian Nights, and the Indian Wise-Animal tales, The Panchatantra. In all of them, story-telling becomes a way of discovering the self, or discovering truth, or gaining wisdom, or
saving one’s life. I re-read, just before beginning One Amazing Thing, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, where a group of strangers are taken hostage, because I really liked the feel of that novel.

The novel is, in a way, also a microcosm for multiculturalism. Who your characters are, what they are and how they respond to the tragedy, have to do with where they come from. How easy or difficult was it to weave in their tales within a tale?
It was quite challenging. Since many of the characters come from non-Indian backgrounds, I had to research their lives carefully. For instance, the African American ex-soldier who fought in Vietnam, or Mr Pritchett, the older Caucasian man, who was brought up by a single mother in poverty.

Some of your novels - and stories - are best portrayals of the immigrant experience. Do you think you have written enough about that or will it continue to have some resonance in your forthcoming works, as it does, albeit in a limited way, in this novel?  
I hope to explore different angles of it. Immigration is such a big part of the life I lead and the stories I see around me, I don’t think I can totally give it up. But I know I want to write very different kinds of novels, such as Palace of Illusions, which retells the Mahabharat from Draupadi’s point of view.

If One Amazing Thing were to be made into a film, what will your preference of a director or cast be? 
There are so many possibilities. I would love to have Nandita Das in the role of Uma, the college student, and Konkona Sen Sharma as Malathi, the rebellious beauty salon employee. I can totally see Laurence Fishburne (who acted as Morpheus in The Matrix) as Cameron.

How important has storytelling been in your own family? What stories did you grow up on?
Storytelling was a big part of my childhood. My mother and grandfather were both great storytellers. From them I learned to love our Bengali folk tales and fairy tales, and stories from our epics and puranas. I continued that tradition with my own children when they were little.

What was the trigger for the novel - about a young Indian woman who sets out on a quest to find her father who is believed to be dead, but actually isn’t - you are currently working on? How long are we going to wait for that?
I have just started that novel, so it will take a while, maybe a couple of years. I’m not sure why the motif of searching for a lost father speaks to me so strongly. Perhaps it is my own search - I never really knew my father well. He was always busy with work, always travelling.

As an aside, If I were to ask you about the one amazing thing that happened to you, besides writing, it would be...
The most mysterious one occurred when I was on a pilgrimage in the Himalayas, returning from Amarnath. I got separated from my group in icy rain and could have died, out there on the glaciers. A man whom I’d never seen before came around a bend in the mountain and helped me across a really difficult stretch of road and took me up to where my group was. Then he disappeared around another bend in the mountain. I searched for him the next morning among all the pilgrim camps, but I never saw him again.

American Express

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni leaves aside Indian exotica to tell an American story

In a basement visa office in an unnamed American city, seven candidates wait for their applications to be stamped. When an earthquake strikes, the group, along with two visa officers, finds itself stranded, waiting for death or deliverance. While they wait, they tell each other stories: about that one thing that made a difference in their lives. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s new novel One Amazing Thing follows the circular pattern of a story in a story, like The Canterbury Tales, which one of the protagonists, Uma, reads as she waits, and a theme worked so well to advantage by novelists like Rana Dasgupta in Tokyo Cancelled.

“I have long been intrigued by works that use the tale-within-a tale framework. I wanted to explore the way the stories reveal characters and have an effect on other characters, the way stories have the power to transform strangers into a close community,” says Divakaruni.

Full report here Indian Express

HT-Penguin India one amazing story contest

To coincide with the publication of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s new book One Amazing Thing, we bring you one amazing contest! Write a 125-150 words mini story on something amazing that’s happened in your life. There are only two rules: you have to be in the story and it has to have a remarkable incident in it.

Entries will be selected by the author and Penguin India editors.

1st Prize: Book vouchers worth Rs 5,000 and a copy of One Amazing Thing.
2nd Prize: Book vouchers worth Rs 3,000 and a copy of the book.
3rd Prize: Book vouchers worth Rs 2,000 and a copy of the book.
PLUS: Early bird prizes of 7 copies of the book for the first 7 entries.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Trapped in a quake, they share stories

Award-winning author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's latest novel about people trapped during an earthquake gets new meaning in a year that has seen devastating quakes hit Haiti, Chile and China.

In One Amazing Thing, a group of nine people are trapped in the visa office at an Indian consulate in an unidentified American city. As they wait to be rescued, they tell each other stories -- sharing one amazing thing from their lives. Divakaruni, who teaches creative writing at the University of Houston in the United States, won the American Book Award in 1995 for her short story collection, Arranged Marriage. Her novel, Mistress of the Spices, was short-listed for the Orange Prize for women's fiction and also made into a film.

The author usually focuses on the experiences of South Asian immigrants, but this time, Divakaruni's characters are from different cultural backgrounds and have their own reasons for wanting to go to India.

One Amazing Thing, published in India in April, also explores their will to live and how they respond to a natural disaster. In an email interview from Houston, Divakaruni told Reuters about the genesis of the novel, her love of complicated narratives and her next project.

Where did the idea for One Amazing Thing come from?
“It was when I was volunteering with (hurricane) Katrina refugees who had come into Houston in 2005 that I first started thinking about the whole phenomenon of grace under pressure, which became a major theme in 'One Amazing Thing'. Some of the people I worked with were so angry. Some of them were devastated. But others were able to maintain calm, or even joke about things. I kept asking myself, Why? Why some and not the others? “A few weeks later I was experiencing a similar situation first-hand -- hurricane Rita was coming through Houston and we were asked to evacuate. As we sat on the freeway late into the night, paralysed by traffic and wondering what would happen to us, I saw people around me responding in many different ways.

The pressure brought out the worst in some and the best in others. Some were toting guns, snarling at people; others were sharing their meagre supplies of water and snacks. That's when I knew I'd have to write a novel about this phenomenon.”

Would you describe it as a novel about karma, about multiculturalism or the human will?
“I think it is all of the above. Or at least it questions the notions of karma and what they mean and how much we as humans can control our lives through our wills. Since in this book right at the beginning the characters are trapped by an earthquake in a visa office situated in the basement of a high-rise building, destiny or karma is obviously a force. “But how they choose to respond to this disaster -- that's where human will comes in. The novel is intentionally multicultural in its character make-up.

Full report here Daily Mirror

India bound, on a visa and a whim

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni tells FYI how being stuck on a freeway when hurricane Katrina struck Houston, made her pick up the pen to write One Amazing Thing

Never mind the author-of-fifteen-books tag, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni isn't the sort to boast, especially when it comes to her familiarity with the Indian diaspora.

Ask her how she manages to write about the community sans stereotypes and she does so with humility. "That's because I'm living the diasporic life myself.

The Indian immigrant experience is multifaceted. The 1960s immigrant's experience is very different from the contemporary immigrant's experience," she explains, in an email interview from the US.One Amazing Thing's underlying theme looks at people's reactions when faced with death and how a community emerges from disaster, which was where Chitra's personal experiences steered the plot.

"We had to evacuate my hometown, Houston, in 2005 when Hurricane Rita approached the city.

Stuck in a huge traffic jam on the Freeway I experienced panic, among a range of other emotions. I wanted to explore those feelings further and it was from that, that One Amazing Thing was born."

Full report here Mid-day

A tale of love, laughter and soul curry

Love blossoms over marzipan and hot coffee in these excerpts from US-based Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's latest novel, One Amazing Thing.

It is an early spring day in 1962 in Calcutta and Jiang, twenty-five years old, stands in the doorway of her father's shoe store inside New Market, under the sign that reads Feng's fine footwear.

She is proud of the sign, of which she is the author. That sign had led to some heated arguments, her grandmother claiming that such an arrogant declaration would attract bad luck.

Look at the other Chinese businesses with their noncommittal nomenclatures: Lucky Orchid, Jade Mountain, Flying Dragon. None of them draw attention to their family name by blazoning it over their storefront. But her father had taken Jiang's side, the way he had ever since her mother had died when Jiang was five, leading her grandmother to lament that he was nothing but a soggy noodle in his daughter's hands.

Full report here India Today

'One Amazing Thing': Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's testament to storytelling

One Amazing Thing
By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Voice, 220 pp., $23.99

The book invents a group of trapped earthquake survivors, who tell their life stories to each other...

From The Seattle Times
Ever since the 1980 publication of "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie's best and most celebrated novel, Indian writers have been emerging in such quantity and quality that they now defy a single classification.

Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry, for example, have created contemporary classics about the subcontinent's people and politics. Meanwhile, the Indian-American Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri has interpreted the immigrant experience for Western readers.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who was raised in India but has spent her adult life in the United States, occupies yet another place in this pantheon. Her fiction is so intimate that it often seems as if cultural context is irrelevant. Her character's dreams and disappointments are paramount.
Such is the case in her latest novel, "One Amazing Thing." As the book opens in the basement of an office building in an unnamed American city, two Indians coolly dispense visas for travel to their country while seven customers remain to be served. One of them, an Indian-American graduate student named Uma, idly observes the racial and ethnic differences among this waiting tribe and thinks they resemble "a mini UN summit."
Suddenly the sense of lassitude erupts into terror. It's as if a "giant took the building in both hands and shook it." Walls crumble, lights go out. An earthquake has locked these strangers together in pain and desperation.
With the office manager, Mr. Mangalam, too overwhelmed to respond, an African-American Vietnam vet snatches the leadership role. He levels a young Muslim man to keep him from opening the door and risking more cave-ins. He apologizes to the stunned witnesses, locates drinking water and gets them to pool their tiny food supply.
In shock, the others meekly comply. But as the hours pass and broken pipes send water inching up the walls, their fear level rises, too. The grad student Uma, nursing a broken wrist, proposes an idea: "With a little burst of excitement, because she sensed the power behind it, she said, 'We can each tell an important story from our lives.'"
This is trademark Divakaruni. The writer's belief in the healing power of storytelling goes back decades, to when she co-founded a hotline for abused Southeast Asian women in the Bay area. So, in such dire circumstances, her characters in "One Amazing Thing" turn to revelatory narratives about themselves. First up: an old Chinese woman who had planned to travel to India to see the man she didn't marry.
The situation makes for honest tellers and good listeners. When the accountant in the group looks back on his neglectful mother, Uma reflects sadly on her own, "who had watched out for her with a hawk-eyed vigilance that she had ungraciously tolerated." When the manager Mr. Mangalam describes his bad marriage, he blames himself as much as his harridan of a wife.
"Karma's wheel is intricate," he says.
"What do you mean, karma's wheel?" the accountant's wife demands — and the image sets the stage for her own tale.
The karmic energy of "One Amazing Thing" revolves around Divakaruni's gifts as a novelist. She creates a setting in which the characters' self-awareness and candor seem believable. They become a group of modern-day Scheherazades, using their own lives to stave off whatever fate is to befall them.
Divakaruni cares less about the physical rescue than the emotional one that comes from having a person know what animates his or her life. As such, "One Amazing Thing" ends with the silent question: What story would you tell under the same kind of circumstances?

From Oregon Live.com

In an unnamed U.S. city an earthquake shakes the Indian Consulate, collapsing the roof, trapping nine disparate individuals inside. The trapped have no means of contact with the outside, no way of knowing the extent of the quake or the likelihood of rescue. Tensions arise and conflicts erupt, interrupted by a young Indian woman who proposes that to calm themselves each tell "one special thing" from his or her life. "Everyone has a story," she says to their protests.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's new novel "One Amazing Thing" starts as each obliges, as around them the building shifts, time passes and water gathers at their feet before beginning slowly to rise. What follows is not quite a 9/11 story but one that seems very much of our time, a time when the possibility of disaster is more real to citizens of this country than it has been since the posturing of the Cold War.
The stories that follow are as varied as the characters: Fariq, a devout Muslim Indian; Cameron, an African American Vietnam vet who takes charge of the situation; Mr. and Mrs. Pritchett, white bread (and white) Americans; Jiang, an elderly Chinese woman, and Lily, her punk granddaughter; Uma, a college student, born to Indian parents but largely Americanized; Mangalam, the consular official the others had arrived to see, and Malathi, his secretary.
Several of these stories comprise the strongest part of the novel, particularly Jiang's tale of her illicit romance with a Hindi man before the 1962 Sino-Indian war, and Malathi's path from docile bride-to-be to independence through Miss Lola's Lovely Ladies Salon in rural India. But Mr. and Mrs. Pritchett -- doubtless so titled to show their stiffness -- are cardboard-flat, and it is in the passages referring to them that Divakaruni's tendency to tell rather than show is strongest, weakening otherwise vivid writing. This habit of turning to the reader to present missing information (more common to 19th-century prose), along with a tendency to slalom quickly between different points of view -- sometimes within the same paragraph -- leaves an impression of carelessness or hurry. "One Amazing Thing" comes in at a little over 200 pages, adding to that impression.
Also, aspects of the story strain belief. As Divakaruni, herself responsible for paragraphs of breathless questions, might put it: Would a diverse collection of suspicious strangers so easily spill these intimate details of their lives to each other? Why do none of these nine characters trapped by the earthquake ever, once, wonder about loved ones or friends who might have been killed or trapped outside? (And why is the book titled "One Amazing Thing" when each character recounts their entire life story?)
Divakaruni's previous works include well-received novels "The Mistress of Spices" (1997) and "Sister of My Heart" (1999). She also has turned her hand to a young adult fantasy series. Compared to her earlier books, this is Divakaruni lite.

From wbur.org

Poet, short-story writer and novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni cut her teeth listening to her grandfather tell tales from the ancient Indian epics — the Ramayana and Mahabharata — by lantern light in his Bengali village. This storytelling legacy shines brightly in her entrancing new novel, One Amazing Thing, in which nine people in the passport office in the basement of the Indian Consulate in San Francisco are yoked together by fate when an earthquakes hits.
Uma, a sharply observant graduate student awaiting a visa to visit her retired parents in "shining India," mistakes the quake's first tremor for a cable car. She notes the sour-faced young Indian woman at the reception desk, gatekeeper for the passport officer, and the others in the waiting room: a Caucasian couple in their 60s; a young man, about 25, whom she takes for Indian (Tariq is, in fact, Muslim-American, and unsettled by how he is perceived after Sept. 11); a Chinese women with her teenage granddaughter. Divakaruni writes: "It was not uncommon, in this city, to find persons of different races randomly thrown together. Still, Uma thought, it was like a mini U.N. summit."
As the quake hits with full force, Divakaruni moves effortlessly from one character to another, and across a spectrum of raw feeling: panic; pain; antagonism; selfishness. She reveals intimate details and sensual reactions so vivid you feel as if you're with each of them in the room...Read more...

From Winnipeg Free Press

The would-be travellers in Texas writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's new novel aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Eerily evocative of recent events in Haiti, an earthquake has trapped these nine disparate individuals in an Indian visa/passport office in an unnamed U.S. city. Instead of planning their trips to India, they're now struggling to survive. Although her plot seems a bit contrived and the characters are numerous, Divakaruni's writing is evocative and engaging, making One Amazing Thing well worth the read.
The protagonist and occasional narrator, Uma Sinha, is a medieval lit graduate student. But the cast includes: a Chinese grandmother -- who once lived a secret-life -- and her rebellious teen granddaughter; an African-American former soldier; a 70-year-old Caucasian accountant and his wife; a young Muslim-American man dealing with the fallout of 9/11 on his family; and two visa officers who recently shared a forbidden kiss.

Moments before the earthquake hits, Uma -- who has always been interested in the secrets of strangers -- thinks it looks like a mini United Nations summit in the visa office. "Whatever were all these people planning to do in India?" she wonders.
Born in India, Divakaruni left Calcutta more than 30 years ago and currently teaches creative writing in Houston. She is the author of 14 books, including The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, which have been made into movies.
She's a gifted writer, with a knack for creating compelling characters.
The novel takes flight as Uma, inspired by the copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales she has in her backpack, suggests that they each share one important story from their lives. "I don't believe anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing."
Much more interesting than the rationing of food, moving of tables and digging out of debris are the lives of these characters. There's forbidden love, secret worlds, defiant acts and deep disappointment in the stories.
Also, the tellers' connections to India are revealed through these very personal stories. These people possibly have only hours left to live, but their transforming tales help break down boundaries -- cultural and otherwise -- among them.
Tariq, a Muslim-American man, speaks of the impact of 9/11 on his family's once thriving janitorial business and his father's mysterious abduction by four men in suits and subsequent reappearance. "From having put up my story against the others, I can see this much: everyone suffers in different ways. Now I don't feel so alone."
The strangers bond through the powerful stories and the uncertainty of their circumstances. Will each breath be their last? Divakaruni keeps her characters, and readers, in suspense. Given Uma's love of literature, One Amazing Thing is filled with references to Chaucer, Defoe, Tolkien and others. This would be great book club material. Also, the surprise ending might make for a lively discussion.

From Washington Times

Chitra Divakaruni's "One Amazing Thing" begins with Uma reading Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" as she waits in the basement visa office of an Indian consulate in California. Uma needs a visa so she can visit her parents, who, after years of working in America, have returned to their homeland. Others wanting visas include a middle-aged white couple, a young man of Indian descent, a black American man, and a Chinese woman and her granddaughter. But things are moving slowly. The clerk, whose name turns out to be Malathi, takes her time, often making excuses to walk through the door marked Mr. V.K.S. Mangalam, to consult with her boss.
Uma, who is annoyed at her parents' departure, is irritated by the slowness of it all, and pays little attention to distant rumbles - just a passing cable car, she thinks. Then suddenly, "The rumble rose through the floor. This time there was no mistaking its intention. It was as though a giant had placed his mouth against the building's foundation and roared. The floor buckled throwing Uma to the ground. The giant took the building in both hands and shook it. A chair flew across the room toward Uma. She raised her left arm to shield herself. The chair crashed into her wrist and a pain worse than anything she had known surged through her arm."
Uma's wrist is fractured, and she and the rest of the visa seekers are trapped in the consulate as a major earthquake destroys the building. Compared with many earthquake victims, they are lucky. No one apart from Uma is injured. The office has chairs and tables. Malathi finds a flashlight and a minimalist first-aid kit. Mr. Mangalam even has a private bathroom that remains functioning for quite a while, so they have sufficient water. Food is more of a problem, but snacks culled from everyone's totes plus a few office supplies rounded up by Malathi stave off any threat of immediate starvation...Read more