Face

Jaspreet Singh's much anticipated third novel traces a past crime that suddenly becomes confrontable on another continent. Lila, a brilliant Indian-born science journalist, and Lucia, an aspiring European-born writer, meet at a creative writing workshop in Calgary. Both try to use fiction to work through real-life trauma, but their entangled paths may reach all the way back to Lila's time as a geology student in the foothills of the Himalayas.

How best to tell Lila's story and follow the links between a fossil fraud in India, an ice core archive in Canada, the Burgess Shale quarry, and a climate change laboratory in Germany? As their detective work unfolds, the two women encounter some of today's most urgent and fascinating science, as well as the many shapes of internal criticism in the sciences. They also come face to face with ecological grief and human-non-human entanglements. With this playful and deeply serious genre-blurring work, Singh gives a new direction to the novel in the Anthropocene. (From Touchwood Editions)

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Jaspreet Singh is the author of the novels Chef and Helium, the story collection Seventeen Tomatoes and the poetry collection November. His nonfiction has been published in Granta, Brick: A Literary Journal and the New York Times. Singh lives in Calgary.