Between Hope and Despair

Barua’s very first novel is an intricate pattern of cultures and politics, refugees and resisters and locates South Asian politics in a wider context. A political analyst and commentator, he turns to Tibet but spreads out in other directions both space wise and at ideological levels—India, China, Nepal and the US. A perceptive study of the violence both of aggression and of resistance, it moves between hope and despair.