The Mud of a Century

The narrator teaches Japanese to young software engineers in Chennai, in southern India. After days of downpour the Adyar River breaks its banks in the kind of flood that comes once a century, and almost the entire city goes under. Elbowing through the crowds who have come to gape at the torrent below, she starts across a bridge toward her office on the other bank. Everything has been buried in silt: bottles of whisky, a mummified mermaid, coins minted for the Osaka Expo, even grief. With so much smothered in mud, she can no longer tell her own memories from other people's, as a century of them rises up out of the flood.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

125 pages in the original

Genres

Speculative (assigned by AI)

Set in

India

First published

2017 by Shinchosha

Author's age

54 when first published

ISBN

9784103515319 (original)

9780648901198 (Gazebo Books, Australia)