The Sibius Knot

Amy, Tara and Mario are siblings growing up in the India of the 1990s. Their parents get together, split, move houses and cities, across the plains and hills, across continents and seas, and the three children have nothing but each other to rely on. Into their lives come friends – LB, the Little Bastard, Seema, Preetha, Dan, and later, Sid, Dhruv and Ruchika – and one deadly foe: HH, dark, shape-shifting, threatening, the ultimate malevolence. Mario turns his gang into an army, and together they fall down the rabbit hole, bereft but bound, into a world they do not always understand, for encounters they do not always seek. In a crushing story about growing up, Amrita Tripathi weaves a magical tapestry: of choices that aren’t, against fates that are, bringing adolescence alive by way of blood, semen and sweat, and the hallucinatory passages of time that join childhood and adulthood in contemporary India, an unsettled place, at odds with itself. The Sibius Knot is a blistering novel that is a metaphor for the India of today.