Review of Our City That Year by Geetanjali Shree

*Our City That Year* by Geetanjali Shree (2025). Published by HarperVia.

If you’re new here and found this blog through the mysterious powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I’m a dedicated reader and movie watcher who thought to turn this website into a little digital archive of sorts.

I was watching and reading so much that I wanted to keep track of it all, so I began blogging as a way to keep these books as memories somewhat forever.

That said, I recently fell into a period of unemployment, and this blog was a solace for me. Not only was it a way to make a little bit of money when there was nothing else coming my way really, but I found, after getting my finances in order, that I enjoyed sitting down to write blog posts when I had nothing else to do in my day.

I’ve been dubbing this period as funemployment while I look for a job, but the job market isn’t looking too great right now. Regardless, I spend a lot of time in my local library, and because I am such a big fan of simple living, I enjoy the little moments where I can find a book for free here or there, while also supporting such a critical aspect of my community.

While I do love a good book from the library, being funemployed has led to another new discovery: I can finally catch up on all of the advance copies I receive! In the past I found myself inundated with advance copies, which led me to realize I need to be a bit more picky and choosy about what kinds of ARCs I was inviting into my life.

I decided to tackle my list of advance copies during this period, and I managed to get through a good portion of them! I tend to blog about most of the books I receive, if not all (I can’t recall any that I haven’t reviewed lately, but that could be my memory failing me here), as I want to put out what I thought about these books before I forget I even read them (hence why I started this blog to begin with).

I’ve tried to read Geetanjali Shree’s work, but I have a bit of difficulty with longer works sometimes. I understand why people try to make longer pieces and bodies of work, and sometimes they work really well. You just have to learn how to sustain the piece and not make it stuffed with filler.

Anyways, let’s get into the review of Our City That Year. I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know they can get quite long and they’re not what people are here for usually.

Much love to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy! I truly do not take these advance copies for granted.

In one city, religious divides between Hindus and Muslims reach a fanatical frenzy.

For some context behind this book: it’s getting translated into English, for American audiences, for the first time now in 2025, but it came out originally in 1998. A lot of what happens in this novel has gotten worse in India when it comes to religious tensions, and I have firsthand seen how exactly this has impacted people.

Anyways, Our City That Year takes place in the city that is mentioned in the title almost exclusively. It’s narrated by an unknown individual, but they are fairly detached from what’s going on—or at least as detached as they can be. One of the characters is Shruti, who watches as the city is on the brink of a major change. She notes down how things are slowly getting even more tense when it comes to the divide between the Muslims and Hindus living there.

She’s unable to find the right words to describe what she’s witnessing all around her, which is pretty believable. At first the situation doesn’t seem to entirely be horrible and can be salvaged, but as we see throughout the course of the book, misinformation, fear, and hate can easily spread throughout a small region, especially when people aren’t willing to listen to each other.

That said, there are some other characters we get to meet throughout the novel. Most prominent are Sharad and Harif, who are two academics working at a local university. It’s through these two, who are highly educated and a part of the intellectual elite at the time, that we see how people are easily caught in the trap of extremism.

We also get to see Daddu, who happens to be Sharad’s father. He’s someone who stands out in this cast as someone who can help salvage the dark future ahead, but we don’t actually know by the time we get to the end if there’s hope.

A lot of this is documenting what was going on in the city at that time, especially when the marginalized become silent and are unable to speak for themselves. Someone has to be able to witness the chaos and ideological shifts happening all around the city, and it’s through this novel it captures a broader picture of India at the time.

I found this novel to be a bit more direct and straightforward than the other Shree book I tried to read (I couldn’t finish it about halfway through): Tomb of Sand. I found that book so difficult to get through, even though I was interested in what it had to say. I think maybe it was the wrong time for me to read it.

But in this book, I liked the focus on the intellectual elites witnessing everything going on and getting sucked into it, but I thought that maybe an effective approach, or perhaps a different novel that I would want to read, is through the ordinary people who become consumed by these ideological shifts.

Overall Thoughts

I would say I enjoyed this book overall! I’ve been wanting to read more Indian literature, especially as I had wanted to when I was expecting to move to India temporarily. I lost my Fulbright because I was denied a visa by the Indian government and never made it there, so I feel like I’m finally ready to jump back into the swing of reading South Asian literature.

Anyways, I think this book could have been a tad shorter though. I wish I could read it in Hindi to see how it would compare with the translation, as I felt like it was a bit janky in some sections and was overexplaining what the characters were thinking and feeling in a specific given moment. I do wonder if the original was like that.

This is a must read if you want to understand contemporary Indian society and politics through the prism of fiction. It’s pretty much a good reflection of the way things are going right now, which is wild to say almost thirty years after the book was originally published in India.

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