Avik Jain Chatlani was born in Canada and raised in Chile. He earned degrees in history and Latin American studies from McGill University and Boston University. He works as a translator and editor and has worked as a teacher in prisons in the United States and Latin America. Chatlani divides his time between Ottawa and Washington DC. His grandparents were the first emigrants to Peru from India.
Fiction
This Country is No Longer Yours
Bond Street Books, 2024.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Based on real events in 1970s–2000s Peru, This Country Is No Longer Yours tells the story of people living through the terrorist campaign of the Maoist Shining Path, while struggling to survive amid economic crisis and state collapse.
A student of the revolution’s leader is dispatched to Cambodia to learn from the Khmer Rouge, sending him spiralling into a world of unfathomable political violence that both inspires him and will be his undoing. Then, as the terror spreads across Peru, a ruthless security agent of the newly-elected neoconservative government works to squash the growing insurgency now threatening the halls of power, while applying his surveillance training to romantic pursuits—with chilling results.
…
Depicting a place and time ravaged by terror but alive with new ambitions and enduring love, Jain Chatlani explores the intersection of political breakdown and human endurance, as well as the unbearable choices demanded of those living in a society at war with itself. With incisive and haunting prose, combined with deeply personal insight, Jain Chatlani offers a stinging indictment of the ideologies that brutalize the very people they claim to represent, and relays an urgent warning about the dangers of zealotry, political messianism and acts of violence justified in the name of a cause.
Links
Publisher Bond Street Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House