A Thousand Times Before
ABOUT
THE BOOK
A heartrending family saga following three generations of women connected by a fantastic tapestry, sweeping readers from Partition-era India to modern day Brooklyn.
Ayukta is finally sitting down with her wife Nadya to respond to a question she’s long avoided: Should they have a child? The decision is complicated by a secret her family has kept for centuries, one that Ayukta will be the first to share with someone outside their bloodline: the women in her family inherit a mysterious tapestry, through which each generation can experience the memories of those who came before her.
Ayukta invites Nadya into this lineage, carrying her through its past. She relives her grandmother Amla’s life: Once a happy child in Karachi, Amla migrates to Gujarat during Partition, witnessing violence and loss that forever shape her approach to marriage and motherhood. Amla’s daughter, Arni, bears this weight in her own blood in 1974, when gender equity and urban class distinctions divide the community as a bold student movement takes hold. As Ayukta unspools these generations of women—whole decades of love, loss, heartbreak, and revival—she reveals the tapestry’s second gift: the ability for each of these women to dramatically reshape their own worlds. Like all power, both fantastic and societal, this inheritance is more treacherous than it seems.
What would it mean, to impart an impossible burden? To withhold these incredible gifts?
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
A Thousand Times Before by Asha Thanki is a debut novel with themes that touch on the weight and joy of family memory and inheritance, the power of art, diasporic movement, both forced and voluntary, and protest. In present-day Brooklyn, Ayukta sits down with her wife to share a family secret: that through a tapestry and a family inheritance, she can access the memories of the women in her family who came before her. Through that ability, we see the stories of her grandmother, Amla, during the India/Pakistan partition; and her mother, Arni, during the student protests in 1974 Gujarat, India, as they both try to use the family gift to shape their futures. (Seattle Public Library)