The Apparition

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

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

It's the fading years of the fourteenth-century Delhi Sultanate, and famine, court intrigues, an ailing, irascible Sultan, local rebellions and fear of invading Mongol armies keep the regime on edge. Under these conditions, an enigmatic, sphere-like object appears in the western sky. Some call it a divine warning. Others, the herald of a liberation.

Amir Hassan al-Shirazi—Sufi poet, historian and reluctant witness to the Sultanate's decline—is charged with uncovering the origin of this apparition in the sky and what it portends. His search for answers draws him into a city collapsing into paranoia: courtiers and scholars disappear, heretics burn and the city's faith in reason is overtaken 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 promise the citizens of Delhi a purer and more harmonious order.

At first, their reign brings the peace and order so craved by Delhiites, as the hungry are fed, castes are dissolved and reason returns. Delhi, it seems, has been reborn. Yet beneath this imposed harmony, old fears and new cruelties slowly appear, and Amir Hassan fears his beloved Delhi is slowly losing its history and identity. While books are censored, speech is altered, and clothing is refashioned, dissenters are vanishing and a movement of violent resistance is rising. And when Amir Hassan visits
the Avians’ mountain homeland, he discovers the terrible price they have paid for their alien Utopia.