The First Five-Dozen Tales of Razia Shah: and Other Stories

Razia Shah—a promising, bright, suicidally-depressed seventeen-year-old living in New Delhi—has to tell herself a new story each day to convince herself to keep living until the next. Amir Mousa, a Palestinian shopkeeper in North Carolina, finds his thoughts jolting back to his lost village after he wins the lottery. Soon Punjabi, Congolese, and Mexican immigrants’ stories are told following the structure of the Jewish liturgical calendar, the folk hero of a forgotten people embarks on a quest to gather stories like grain against a famine, the leader of a merchant household in an alternate Indian Ocean trading culture is forced to confront his failure to keep a covenant with his slaves, and a hospital patient begins hallucinating the life history of his Indian-American anesthesiologist’s father. The novella and five short stories that make up The First Five-Dozen Tales of Razia Shah and Other Stories combine fantastical imagery and lyrical language to meditate on the pressures human beings face in an era of migration and rapid social change—and the power of storytelling in the face of those pressures.