A Person Is A Prayer

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Bedi and Sushma's marriage is arranged. When they first meet, they stumble through a faltering conversation about happiness and hope, and agree to go in search of these things together. But even after their children, Selena, Tara and Rohan, are grown up and have their own families, Bedi and Sushma are still searching. Years later, the siblings attempt to navigate life without their parents. As they travel to the Ganges to unite their father’s ashes with the opaque water, it becomes clear that each of them has inherited the same desire to understand what makes a happy life, the same confusion about this question and the same enduring hope. A Person Is a Prayer plumbs the depths of the spaces between family members and the silence that rushes in like a flood when communication deteriorates. It is about how short a life is and how the choices we make can ripple down generations.

Ammar Kalia is a writer, musician and journalist living in London. Since 2019, he has been the Guardian?s global music critic and has written for publications including the Observer, BBC, Dazed, Mixmag, The Economist, Downbeat and Crack. In 2020, he published a collection of poetry and an accompanying album, Kintsugi: Jazz Poems for Musicians Alive and Dead, and in 2022, his essay on music and identity was included in the collection Haramacy. A Person Is a Prayer is Kalia?s debut novel and was shortlisted for the Unbound Firsts Prize in 2022.

Ammar Kalia

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