Championed by Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker, Qurratulain Hyder is one of the “must reads” of Indian literature. Fireflies in the Mist is Hyder’s capstone to her astonishing River of Fire, which was hailed by The New York Review of Books as “magisterial with a technical resourcefulness rarely seen before in Urdu fiction.” Fireflies follows the creation of modern day Bangladesh – from Indian province, to Partition, to the emergence of statehood – as told through the impassioned voice of Deepali Sarkar and the others around her who live through the turbulence.…

The most important novel of twentieth-century Urdu fiction, Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire was first published as Aag ka Darya in 1959. River of Fire encompasses the fates of four recurring characters over two and a half millennia: Gautam, Champa, Kamal, and Cyril––Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian. In different eras, different relations form and reform among the four: romance and war, possession and dispossession. Lyrical and witty, Hyder’s prose interweaves parables, legends, dreams, diaries, and letters.…