Hands Like Trees

by Sabyasachi Nag

$21.95

• May 2023
• print ISBN: 978-1-55380-686-8
• ebook ISBN: 978-1-55380-687-5
• PDF ISBN: 978-1-55380-688-2
• 5″ x 8″ Trade paper, 240 pages
• Fiction

An act of passion reverberates across continents when Visma Sen decides to remain in Calcutta when his family migrates to Canada.

Selected by CBC for their spring highlights!

“Highly recommended. This is an accomplished collection of short stories that will take the reader to new worlds and deeply intimate places.” – The Miramichi Reader.

Thank you to Rob McLennan for his “20 Questions with Sabyasachi Nag”

Sabyasachi Nag evokes the rising heat of Calcutta in the early morning as masterfully as he depicts the calmness of a snow-lit evening street in Brampton, Ontario while the entangled lives of the Sens of Shulut unfurl over three decades. Each linked story is told through the voice of a different member of the Sen family, from Nilroy’s movingly excruciating rst day as caregiver to Aunt Rita with dementia to Milli’s ambition to host her guru Mata G. The experiences of each character draw a portrait of the Sen family, whose wounds drive them to pursue an ever-elusive happiness, while clearly yearning for identity and belonging.

“Sabyasachi Nag’s story cycle, Hands Like Trees, is Arundhati Roy as if written in the mode of Alice Munro. Nag is a masterful writer, presenting the oddities of here and the eccentricities of there. The migrant seeks Oz, but ends up in a Twilight Zone of the slippage between promise and fate, possibility and doom.”
– George Elliott Clarke, Author of Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir

“With richly poetic details and a commanding voice, Sabyasachi Nag captures his characters at moments of frailty, connection, and reflection. [Hands Like Trees] is a collection of haunting, powerful stories by a writer to watch.”
– Alix Ohlin, Giller-nominated novelist

“A sharp and incisive collection from a compelling new voice in Canadian fiction.”
– Annabel Lyon, winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

“The book maps a strange physics of existence. Reading it in one stretch was like peeking into the chamber of a particle collider. The characters move damagedly in worlds of existential dread. They fear that their secrets will be discovered.”
– Ahmad Saidullah, author of Happiness and Other Disorders

“These poignant stories, poetic in their detailed descriptions and flawed characters, highlight a life of challenges for those who have and those who have not and reflect a society where even class doesn’t protect you from the realities of a disconnected or interrupted life.”
– Stella Harvey, author of Finding Callidora

“A totally engaging experience. We come away from these stories challenged and deepened.”
– Stephen Morrissey, author of The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche

“The stories in Hands Like Trees evoke a vivid, often disquieting world. Moving deftly from character to character, Sabyasachi Nag draws us deep inside a tangle of kinship to reveal secrets both guarded and shared. A fresh and fearless collection.”
– Alissa York, author of Far Cry

“Glows with life in every story. Here are characters that are complex, astute, painful, funny, enlightening and most of all enjoyable. Restless men and wilful women, who seek escape but also belonging, a contradiction and elusiveness that bursts with wit and empathy. These are nimble stories imbued with insight into the ties that bind, the ties that break, stories that shimmer with the soul of a poet. Cool and fierce, the power of Sabyasachi Nag’s writing pulses with grace and maturity. A marvellous debut.”
– John Vigna, author of No Man’s Land