The Apparition

From two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji comes a brilliant new novel that bends history, myth and fantasy to cast an eye on how empires are built, and how they collapse.

When a light appears in the sky above a dying empire, the world below begins to change . . .

It's the fading years of the 13th-century Delhi Sultanate, and famine, court intrigue and fears of invading Mongol armies have plunged Delhi into turmoil. As the empire lies on the brink of collapse, a strange, luminous presence suddenly appears in the western sky. Some call it a divine warning. Others, the herald of a new age.

Amir Hassan al-Shirazi—Sufi poet, historian and reluctant witness to the Sultanate's decline—is charged with uncovering the truth of this apparition in the sky. His search for answers draws him through a world collapsing into paranoia: courtiers and scholars vanish, heretics burn and the city's faith in reason is consumed by religious fanaticism and end-of-days bacchanalian revelry. Then, just when it seems Delhi can take no more, the skies darken, and strange, winged conquerors descend upon the city. Delhi has fallen not to barbarians, but to the Avians, a half-man, half-bird race of beings who claim to offer a purer and more peaceful order.

At first, their reign brings the peace and order so craved by Delhians, as the hungry are fed, castes are dissolved and the city is remade in the image of reason. Delhi, it seems, has been reborn. Yet beneath this fragile harmony, old fears and new cruelties take slowly root. Books are censored, memories rewritten, and those who question the new regime mysteriously vanish into the night. When Hassan is exiled to the Avians' hidden mountain realm, he discovers the terrible perfection at the heart of their world, and the thin line dividing mercy from domination.

Sweeping, visionary and profoundly daring, The Apparition is M.G. Vassanji's most ambitious novel yet. Bending historical fiction with speculative fiction, The Apparition is a penetrating exploration of the rise and fall of empires, the seductions of power and purity and the fragile persistence of compassion amid the ruins of history.