AMIL AND THE AFTER

In this stand-alone companion volume to Hiranandani’s Newbery Honor title, The Night Diary (2018), a boy in post-partition Bombay grapples with the bitter realities of surviving trauma.

After leaving their beloved home in Mirpur Khas, which is now part of the newly created Pakistan, 12-year-old twins Amil and Nisha are living in Bombay with their doctor father, paternal grandmother, and beloved family cook. While Amil (whose late mother was Muslim and father is Hindu) is grateful for their newfound safety, he’s haunted by memories of their flight. Nisha kept a diary during their journey, and when she suggests Amil should draw to express his feelings, he begins sketching the family’s new life. In addition to harboring complicated, painful feelings around his mother’s death in childbirth, a result of complications from his breech positioning, Amil realizes while engaging in his art that his emotions are more intense and complicated than ever. These feelings come to a head when a classmate who was orphaned during the religious violence desperately needs his help, and Amil must decide what to do. This book is a masterpiece of nuance, vulnerability, and emotional complexity. Readers with ancestral connections to the Partition will especially appreciate its layered exploration of the lives of survivors, but Hiranandani provides enough context, skillfully woven throughout, that readers of all backgrounds will find it accessible and absorbing. Final art not seen.

A quietly brilliant, deeply insightful story of living in uncertain times.