All The Names They Used For God
by Anjali Sachdeva
Buy on Amazon"A haunting, diverse debut story collection that explores the isolation we experience in the face of the mysterious, often dangerous forces that shape our lives, Anjali Sachdeva's debut collection spans centuries, continents, and a diverse set of characters but is united by each character's epic struggle with fate: A workman in Andrew Carnegie's steel mills is irrevocably changed by the brutal power of the furnaces; a fisherman sets sail into overfished waters and finds a secret obsession from which he can't return; an online date ends with a frightening, inexplicable dissapearance. Her story "Pleiades" was called "a masterpiece" by Dave Eggers.…
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"The stories in this collection read like fairy tales – Brothers Grimm, not Disney. Anjali Sachdeva spins wondrous universes, governed by unknowable, capricious forces. A homesteader on the American frontier is drawn into an underground world. Genetically engineered septuplets succumb, one by one, to illness. Aliens take over the Earth – they come mostly in peace but demand that humans trade their hands for metal claws. Sachdeva draws characters with such empathy and precision that they pop off the page and take up residence in your brain – months after reading, I remember these stories as if they were dreams."
NPR Books We Love — 2018 · apps.npr.org