“An innovative, moving account of three generations of a South Asian Canadian family as they negotiate time, history, memory and loss, this book of constant, fleeting juxtapositions is a confluence of the intimate and the objective that blends science, personal narrative and fictional elements to push the non-fiction form into bold new territory. In This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, Anand challenges the ways we think about memoir and family history.”
—Governor General’s Award Peer Assessment Committee
“In this formally inventive and expansive memoir, [Anand] combines the precision of scientific language with a plurality of possibilities of poetic language to explore trauma and its legacy.”
—Sangamithra Iyer, Desi Books
“This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart is intimate, elegant, and audacious in its fundamental question of where our stories begin and end.”
—Andreae Callanan, Canadian Notes and Queries
“Truly poetic and at times heartbreaking.”
—Deepa Mehta, filmmaker
“A beautiful experiment that free falls through metaphors and anecdotes, and delivers us truths that are like rare butterflies.”
—Heather O’Neill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel
“I loved this book.”
—Kate Harris, author of Lands of Lost Borders
“Sweeping, gorgeous, bold and piercing.”
—Claudia Dey, author of Heartbreaker
“Erudite, honest, thought-provoking and immensely readable.”
—Olive Senior, author of The Pain Tree
“Madhur Anand shows us how to use science in the service of art.”
—Lee Smolin, author of The Life of the Cosmos
“This is a book I wish I could give to my great-grandparents.”
—Rudrapriya Rathore, writer and critic
“A truly wondrous book.”
—Barb Minett, founder of The Bookshelf
“Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader, Madhur Anand’s exquisite and complex memoir explores memory, science, place, migration, relationships, and ecology, and delves deeply into the multiple meanings of partition. This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual tour de force.”
—Jane Urquhart, author of The Stonecarvers
“An electrical storm of a book. Sweeping, gorgeous, bold and piercing, Madhur Anand writes with control and heat, a far-reaching brain and a poet’s heart. This Red Line achieves the rarest feat: it takes two asymmetrical halves and assembles them into a whole—as vivid and uneasy as life itself.”
—Claudia Dey, Heartbreaker and Stunt
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