Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from KashmirSeventeen Tomatoes is a series of linked stories which revolve around two Sikh boys coming of age in an Indian army camp in Kashmir. Each story takes a minor character from the previous tale and builds a new tale, weaving a collective portrait of the border community. In addition to the boys, Adi (a student of gardens) and Arjun (a budding chemist), we meet a boatman's daughter, a captured Pakistani officer, a celebrity cricket umpire and Parachute Aunty. From modern missiles to cricket matches, from religious miracles to the sumptuous gardens of Shalimar and Nishat, Singh treats beauty and politics and religion in a gentle and humane manner. "His scientific knowledge and diction is unusual in a storyteller--like technology and poetry smashing into each other. It's an exciting collision." --Quill & Quire "The robust, haunting stories of Jaspreet Singh recite an extraordinary human drama. They create a portrait of Kashmir and India that is at once convoluted, comical, raw and savage, steeped in myth yet paradoxically tempered by science. As the old and the new clash, the stories examine the edges of human experience and their wayward effects upon the heart." --Trevor Ferguson "Funny, tragic, elegantly told, these Tales from Kashmir should be read everywhere." --Kristen den Hartog "With just the right mix of suspense and lyricism, and an exacting eye for mot juste, Jaspreet Singh weaves a tapestry out of the fabulous and the real." --Taras Grescoe Born in 1969, Jaspreet Singh grew up in India and Kashmir. In 1990 he moved to Montreal, where he received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from McGill University. In March 2002, Quill and Quire identified him as one of the five new talents to watch. His stories have appeared in the Fiddlehead and Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope and he is currently at work on a novel, The Book of Hanging Gardens. |
