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PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
Beautifully and hauntingly written, After Disasters is told through the eyes of four people in the wake of a life-shattering earthquake in India. An intricate story of love and loss weaves together the emotional and intimate narratives of Ted, a pharmaceutical salesman turned member of the Disaster Assistance Response Team; his colleague Piotr, who still carries with him the scars of the Bosnia conflict; Andy, a young firefighter eager to prove his worth; and Dev, a doctor on the ground racing against time and dwindling resources. Through time and place, hope and tragedy, love and lust, these four men put their lives at risk in a country where danger lurks everywhere.
O. Henry Prize–winning author Viet Dinh takes us on a moving and evocative journey through an India set with smoky funeral pyres, winding rivers that hold prayers and the deceased, and the rubble of Gujarat, a crumbling place wavering between life and death. As the four men fight to impose order on an increasingly chaotic city, where looting and threats of violence become more severe, they realize the first lives they save might be their own.
Praise for After Disasters:
“After Disasters is a wonderful read—the earthquake at the center of these stories permits the characters within them to reveal their essential selves, whether in weakness or heroism. The book has the breadth and sweep of a novel, leading the reader across time and geography, pursuing the trajectories of its protagonists with insight and empathy. Viet Dinh is a splendid writer.” —Antonya Nelson, author of Bound and Funny Once: Stories
“After Disasters is a triumph of pulsating humanity and lyrical ambition. Viet Dinh has written a novel of tremendous range, vibrant scope, and astonishing detail—one that dares to consider the emotional dimensions of natural cataclysms, the conflicts faced by international aid relief workers, and the daily challenges of saving our own brief lives. After Disasters marks the debut of Viet Dinh’s brilliant career.”—Amber Dermont, New York Times bestselling author of The Starboard Sea
“Viet Dinh takes on a multitude of voices in exploring the aftermath of disaster and the ways we fight to do more than survive. A promising debut from a writer whose stories I’ve been following for years. This is one to watch.” —Matthew Salesses, The Hundred-Year Flood
"Dinh is skilled at rendering the messiness of human motivation, and he adeptly harmonizes various preoccupations—masculinity, ecological abrasion, and the complexities of international aid work. In the catastrophe's aftermath, desire, love, and duty often clash."—The New Yorker
"The result is a tale that explores the efficacy of international aid, the price of survival, and the cost of love in an every-shifting global world filled with conflict, catastrophes and failed connections.... Make shelf space for Dinh's stupendous debut, which is bound to appear on this year's lists of award nominations and best-of-compilations. —Booklist (starred review)
"In his debut, Dinh has smart things to say about sexuality and race, but more than anything, After Disasters is most absorbing as a portrait of the people who work in disaster relief. After Disasters is a book of immense empathy, and in many ways, a hopeful one."—GQ
"After Disasters is an impressive debut, remarkable for its complexity and resistance to closure and easy answers. Dinh shows us that being "after disaster" is a fiction: we are forever implicated within ongoing disasters of varying scales. He leaves us with layered moral and political questions.... These questions will haunt us as we find ourselves in the midst of a series of tragedies, trying to make sense of them."—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Shocking, engaging, and moving, this novel embraces humanity in all its messy, thrilling complexity. A strong debut from an author capable of immersing the reader in a foreign world.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Excellent writing and vivid descriptions take readers on a trip to an India that travel books do not cover, sometimes with shocking realism. Short-story author Dinh's impressive storytelling abilities are on display in this mesmerizing debut novel."—Library Journal
"Another A+... a heartrending account of global disaster relief (and love). This novel made me think about headlines in a new way—what really happens in the weeks and months after the earthquake, the flood, the fire. Incredible book.—Lincoln Journal Star
"The book is outright beautiful, one of those rare combinations where you can't stop reading it, so engaged are you in the characters' lives, but equally, you force yourself to stop and sift through a sentence's construction or reflect on how the author has so perfectly captured the ineffable."—Lambda Literary Review
"Dinh's work makes us re-evaluate the people we think of as heroes, and, in fact, even question the concept of such a thing as heroism in a world as complicated as ours. That doesn't mean this is a cynical take at all. Rather, it's a celebration of the messiness of humanity and the beauty found within it."—Nylon
"After Disasters is a story of grit and pain, not unlike the earthquake it follows. Read it at your own peril, but once you do, the pictures it paints in your mind will linger for a long time."—New York Journal of Books
"Dinh has created a book that feels at once designed and chaotic: as if there were a pattern to everything, a pattern that might even be palpable, if only it hadn’t suddenly broken. As you read, you sense that none of Dinh’s characters can help trying to squint at this imaginary, disastrous pattern. It’s as if it were the sun."—The Threepenny Review
"Haunting and heartbreaking, After Disasters is not an easy read by any means. But it gets to the heart of what happens when we are faced with a disaster we can't control, and brilliantly probes into the parts of ourselves that arise in the aftermath."—Refinery 29
"Dinh never misses the human heart of his characters—their desires and needs. The resulting book is one that is intellectually and emotionally stimulating. After Disasters is an impressive debut from a writer we will all be reading more of in the future."—diaCritics
"Dinh attempts to draw out the human desire that propels his characters. Even when times are fraught—or because of it—humans for relationships. The humans in this novel find that in "periods after disasters, they catch up and catch their breath." Disasters may sever limbs but it can also connect."—International Examiner
"The 2001 Gujarat earthquake, which killed more then 20,000 people, draws out the personal stories of four rescue workers in Viet Dinh's novel about competing visions of doing good in the world... Dinh's evocative prose shows moments of brilliance."—The Globe and Mail