RESIDUE

Leon Ali was named after Trotsky by a communist father who disappeared before he could know him. Born in Britain to a Kashmiri family, he was raised by his single mother in Delhi. Keya Raina is also Kashmiri, an academic who studies exile, an immigrant unsure of her place, and a collector of other people's stories. Both carry the weight of Kashmir's troubled history, and they meet in Berlin, a city shaped by Cold War partition.

Together they set out on a search that leads them to Shula Farid, the free-spirited wife of a conventional Bengali diplomat. As they follow her trail across several places, these two young Kashmiris living outside Kashmir uncover surprising truths about themselves, about identities they never chose and about the many places they belong to. What remains is the residue of emotions that people everywhere share.

Residue is a novel about movement and kinship across borders of nation and faith. It gives vivid glimpses of class-divided urban India, of divided Berlin and of the tangles of identity in England. At its core are split territories, fortified continents, lines drawn in blood and memory, and the absences they leave in people's lives and imaginations.