In his playful yet deeply serious third novel Jaspreet Singh links a
fossil fraud in India, an ice core archive in Canada, and a climate
change laboratory in Germany.
Jaspreet Singh's much anticipated third novel traces a past crime that
suddenly becomes confrontable on another continent. Lila, a brilliant
Indian-born science journalist, and Lucia, an aspiring European-born
writer, meet at a creative writing workshop in Calgary. Both try to use
fiction to work through real-life trauma, but their entangled paths may
reach all the way back to Lila's time as a geology student in the
foothills of the Himalayas.
How best to tell Lila's story and follow the links between a fossil
fraud in India, an ice core archive in Canada, the Burgess Shale quarry,
and a climate change laboratory in Germany? As their detective work
unfolds, the two women encounter some of today's most urgent and
fascinating science, as well as the many shapes of internal criticism in
the sciences. They also come face to face with ecological grief and
human-non-human entanglements. With this playful and deeply serious
genre-blurring work, Singh gives a new direction to the novel in the
Anthropocene.