A wonderful Delhi novel for our times, a Shahr-e-Ashob of the new India. History’s Angel is eloquent, brave, elegaic and ultimately, heartbreaking. This remarkable novel reminded me of both of Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and Anita Desai’s In Custody, and confirms Anjum Hasan as one of our finest and most important writers

Poignant … An unsettling, piercingly intimate portrait of the rough birth of Modi’s new India

A beautiful novel exploring tensions in modern India … timely and elegiac

Hasan grants this hero such a complete inner life – and surrounds him with such finely drawn characters – that the very air he breathes seems dense with thoughts and longings

An extraordinary tale of an ordinary Muslim … Hasan is cannily observant, a sophisticated writer with a wry and subtle sense of humour, with which she highlights the ridiculousness and futility of seemingly ordinary milieus, while never detracting from the increasing alienation of a community

Poignant and thought-provoking…deftly highlights the power of ideas

One of the finest contemporary Indian fiction writers… [A] sparkling new novel

An engrossing read

An important book … the characters are compelling, the setting accurate and the sentences shine

This absorbing novel trespasses, from sentence to sentence, the boundaries that usually demarcate the grandeur of the historical from the tedium, humour, and disappointments of ordinary human life. Domesticity, everyday routine, and our historical pasts and futures are conjoined here tantalisingly, with impressive skill, and with real tenderness

A shimmering, intelligent rage roils under a cool surface in History’s Angel, which manages at once to be “made so insistantly, so noisily, of now” and inhabit layers of history. Hasan’s eye is sharp and her aim is unerring. This is a work of sublime elegance

A seething seismic tale about the disturbing times the Muslims of India are living through, in ever growing dread of worse to come. Told in a subdued, sad, ironical tenor, it is compassionate without being sentimental. The novel asserts humanity and hope in the face of widening fissures through its main protagonist who, drawing sustenance from a deep historical perspective, refuses to play the victim and negotiates the situation empathetically

Erudite and languid … Hasan’s layering of history and personal drama accrues a subtle but undeniable power

Extremely timely … History’s Angel helps us view the erasures of the past through a living lens. With sensitivity and nuance, Anjum Hasan draws us into the world of Alif, a Muslim history teacher in contemporary Delhi

Thoughtful, erudite, balancing the country’s contradictions like a Parisian waiter with an overcrowded tray … Does for Delhi what Joyce did for Dublin