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Please join us for the launch of 'Extinction', a Novel by Leeya MehtaAn evening of talking about mothers and daughters, about grief and memories, and how we choose to deal with what we remember.
Speakers
~Leeya Mehta: Prize-winning poet, fiction writer, essayist
~Aanchal Malhotra: Oral historian and author from New Delhi
~Mandira Nayar: Senior journalist & co-founder Agla Varka (moderator)
Thursday, 29 October 2026, 6.30 p.m.
(Please join us for tea at 6pm)
India International Centre
Lecture Room 2, Annexe
KK Birla Lane
New Delhi 110030
Books will be available for sale.
Advance Praise for Extinction:
“A novel about intergenerational trauma that is, more profoundly, a novel about intergenerational resilience: three generations of complex women who have known passion and determination and abuse, but who know, too, how to shelter one’s heart, how to tame tigers. Fanciful, wise, ambitious, Extinction is a remarkable debut.”—Alice McDermott, winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction
“Extinction is as captivating as the white tiger at its center, a novel that moves across generations and continents with piercing intimacy. A deft and wonderful debut.”—Tania James, author of Loot
“Leeya Mehta’s astonishing debut is both intimate and spectacular, grounded in reality yet also taking the reader into other dimensions. She explores the deeply felt love and abuse between three generations of Parsi women who also communicate and are best friends with tigers; both about to become extinct. I read it as if in a fever dream, I could not put it down.”—Sooni Taraporevala, filmmaker, photographer and screenwriter of Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay!
“Spanning eight decades and three generations of a Parsi Zoroastrian family on the brink of vanishing, Extinction is poet Leeya Mehta’s spellbinding debut novel. From post-independence India to twenty-first century Washington, the novel gathers a vast constellation of characters around a single recurring motif—a tiger, spectral and shape-shifting, who threads through the generations, as the one who guards and the one who haunts. Moving between the twilight of the Raj, contemporary Bombay, and the Beltway, Mehta writes with a fabulist’s eye and a reporter’s precision, folding real history—a real white tiger’s line, one of whose descendants was gifted to an American president—into an intimate reckoning with memory, silence, and survival. Tender, unflinching, and gorgeously strange, Extinction asks what we inherit, what we bury, and what finally sets us free.”—Salil Tripathi, journalist and author of The Gujaratis
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Event venue
India International Centre Annexe, Delhi, Iic-Conference Block, Max Mueller Marg, Lodhi Estate, Delhi 110003, India, New Delhi
Tickets
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