This Unfolding Epoch

It is not easy to write fiction about the Anthropocene. How do you tell a story that grapples with the scope of this epoch and the dizzying changes it has brought using an artistic form that prioritizes the struggles of individuals and their small social worlds? For this reason, Jaspreet Singh’s decision to subtitle his latest book, Face, “a novel of the Anthropocene” is an ambitious one.

Singh is at a point in his career where such ambition makes sense. Two previous novels, Chef and Helium, and his collection of short stories, Seventeen Tomatoes, deal with the legacy of partition and anti-Sikh violence in India and Kashmir. Last year, he turned that lens on his own family’s generational trauma in a memoir, My Mother, My Translator. While these works are intimately concerned with the interrelatedness of politics and geography, Singh now adds the...