Helium: a novel

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“A tour de force.” 

 –  Globe and Mail (Canada)

“A powerful meditation on historical forgetting.”

–  Financial Times (UK)

“Masterful.”

 – Live Mint and Wall Street Journal (India)

“Singh illuminates a horrific event: the systematic genocide of minority Sikhs in November 1984... [A] brutally honest indictment of an often glossed-over episode in India’s long history.” 

–  Booklist (US)

“Questions the validity of the image of India as a secular democracy.”

– Telegraph (India)

“Inventive, melancholy, and unflinchingly courageous.” 

–  Siddhartha Deb

“It brought back memories of what I saw and went through myself… This is a book that must be read.”

– Khushwant Singh

“The author centre-stages those who are seldom given voice when histories are documented.”

– The Hindu (India)

“I strongly recommend Jaspreet Singh's latest novel, Helium, to understand the Sikh trauma caused by the one-sided killing of their community members.” 

– Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed, Emeritus Professor, Stockholm University, Sweden. Author of ‘The Punjab: Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed’.

“Today, 30 years later, justice is still being denied to the Sikhs of Delhi. Jaspreet Singh’s Helium eloquently — and with a lot of sensitivity — tells us this saga of hatred, betrayal and killings. Read it. It will make you angry. It will make you think.”

– Pioneer (India)

 “Thought-provoking.”

– Independent (UK)

“If Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn tackles the British post-colonial situation from the ‘inside out’—that is, through an investigation of the refuse of colonialism contained within a small island that expanded treacherously outward—Singh’s novel does the opposite. Helium looks closely at the post-colonial site itself, at the re-purposed ruins and the messy after-shadow of empire in India.” 

– ZYZZYVA (US)

“He examines a difficult period of history through a series of intense personal relationships that draw the reader in to a world that seems ecstatic and doomed at the same time. A wonderfully well-woven tale that shines a light on fascinating and appalling events..”

–  Michael Palin

“A feat of chemistry, but also of alchemy.”

 – Taras Grescoe

“A powerful literary tale that draws you in with its elegiac prose and hard-to-swallow facts.”

– Time Out (Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru) 

"Terrific."

 – Times (UK)

PUBLISHER

Bloomsbury