Sakina's Kiss

An upper-middle class couple in Bangalore, Venkat and Viji, find their quiet life upended—and the flaws in their marriage exposed—when two strange young men come knocking at their door in the middle of the night, claiming to have business with their daughter, Rekha. Since Rekha, a college senior, happens to be away, visiting relatives in the countryside, Venkat sends the boys away—but they come back the next day, and this time they’re not alone. 

As Venkat begins to fear for his daughter’s safety, he is haunted by memories of similar, sinister events from his own youth, culminating in a betrayal and disappearance he’d prefer to forget. As his guilt-ridden imagination leaps between knowing and unknowing, evasion and confrontation, Shanbhag reveals not just the tensions in a marriage or a family, but also the polarization of Indian politics and the resurgence of the Hindu right.

Precise, enigmatic, and suspenseful, Sakina’s Kiss fulfills the promise of Vivek Shanbhag's lauded debut, Ghachar Ghochar, which Parul Sehgal called “A great Indian novel . . . elegant, lean, balletic” (The New York Times).

“Not since Kafka has a writer created such terror and tenderness on the same page. Vivek is probably the best writer writing in any language anywhere. If you read one book from India, read Sakina’s Kiss. If you want to read one novel from anywhere in the world, read Sakina’s Kiss.” 

—Mohammed Hanif

“Vivek Shanbhag is one of those writers whose voice takes your breath away at the first encounter.”

—Yiyun Li

“Astonishingly truthful and marvelously playful, Sakina’s Kiss is an extraordinary novel.” 

—Megha Majumdar

“Vivek Shanbhag is a writer of rare and wonderful gifts.”

—Garth Greenwell

“With echoes of such unreliable narrators as John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier or Tony Webster in Julian Barnes’ Ford-inflected The Sense of an Ending, the strongest resemblance is to another novel — Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning The Promise. That story dealt, like this one, with the moral and psychological consequences over generations of a family’s failure to honour a promise. In each case, the promise in question is a plot of land. Shanbhag’s novel is subtle and ultimately devastating.”

—The Hindu

“Shanbhag addresses themes of patriarchy, family, parenthood and middle-class India in a subtly intense style that makes for a light read, but is profoundly insightful.”

—India Today 

“An apparently simple, gripping, good read . . . Venkat is much like Prufrock, a figure in the shadow of the looming war symbolising the existential angst of the indecisive and ineffectual man. A thriller from start to finish.”

—Mint 

“Ironic, fresh, dark and often wicked, Shanbhag’s sharp writerly eye delights in new comic and metaphoric opportunities. A shimmering kaleidoscope.”

—Deccan Herald

Praise for Ghachar Ghocar

“A great Indian novel . . . This spiny, scary story of moral decline, crisply plotted and no thicker than my thumb, has been heralded as the finest Indian novel in a decade . . . Folded into the compressed, densely psychological portrait of this family is a whole universe: a parable of rising India, an indictment of domestic violence, a taxonomy of ants and a sly commentary on translation itself . . . Elegant, lean, balletic.”

—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review

“Shanbhag—and his translator, Srinath Perur—have rendered emotions and even random thoughts in language that’s as pungent as those spices the family is marketing. Within the tight confines of a hundred pages or so, Shanbhag presents as densely layered a social vision of Bangalore as Edith Wharton did of New York in The House of Mirth . . . He’s one of those special writers who can bring a fully realized world to life in a few pages and also manages to work in smart social commentary about fears that don't require much translation.”

—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“This stunning Bangalore-set family drama underlines the necessity of reading beyond our borders . . . Ghachar Ghochar is both fascinatingly different from much Indian writing in English, and provides a masterclass in crafting, particularly on the power of leaving things unsaid . . . the short novel is the perfect form for Shanbhag’s particular talents: precise observations, accumulation of detail, narrative progression by way of oblique tangents.”

—Deborah Smith, The Guardian

“Gripping . . . This slim volume . . . nimbly translated by Srinath Perur from the south Indian language of Kannada, tells a story that packs a powerful punch, both in terms of the precision of its portrait of one Bangalore-based family, and, by extension, what this tells us about modern India . . . Shanbhag is the real deal, this gem of a novel resounding with chilling truths.

—Lucy Scholes, The Independentt, Five-Star Review

Vivek Shanbhag’s first translated novel, Ghachar Ghochar, was named a best book by The New York Times and the Guardian and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in Bangalore.

Srinath Perur writes about science, travel, and books among other things and translates from Kannada to English. He is the author of the travelog If It's Monday It Must Be Madurai and the translator of This Life at Play and Ghachar Ghochar.

Sakina's Kiss • Paperback ISBN: 9781961341296

Feb 11, 2025 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 40

5" x 8.5" • 192 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341302