“Leeya Mehta has written a brave, beautiful work that is an elegy for stolen innocence, a howl against silence, a love letter to the imagination as route to freedom, and, ultimately, a celebration of lives reclaimed.”
—Molly McCloskey, author of Straying & other books
Early Praise
“A novel about intergenerational trauma that is, more profoundly, a novel about intergenerational resilience: three generations of complex women who have known passion and determination and abuse, but who know, too, how to shelter one’s heart, how to tame tigers. Fanciful, wise, ambitious, Extinction is a remarkable debut.”
— Alice McDermott, author of nine novels, and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
“Leeya Mehta’s astonishing debut is both intimate and spectacular, grounded in reality yet also taking the reader into other dimensions. She explores the deeply felt love and abuse between three generations of Parsi women who also communicate and are best friends with tigers; both about to become extinct. I read it as if in a fever dream, I could not put it down.”
— Sooni Taraporevala, filmmaker, photographer and screenwriter of Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay!
“Leeya Mehta’s Extinction draws you into worlds so visceral you can smell the cardamom, feel the monsoon winds against your skin and hear a wild animal panting in the distance. Effortlessly spanning decades and continents, this is a book about our imperfect memories, the magnetic pull of family and what happens when our secrets threaten to devour us. Most of all, it is the kind of book you can lose yourself in for many blissful days.”
— Eric Weiner, New York Times bestselling author of The Geography of Bliss and other books
“Spanning eight decades and three generations of a Parsi Zoroastrian family on the brink of vanishing, Extinction is poet Leeya Mehta’s spellbinding debut novel. From post-independence India to twenty-first century Washington, the novel gathers a vast constellation of characters around a single recurring motif—a tiger, spectral and shape-shifting, who threads through the generations, as the one who guards and the one who haunts. Moving between the twilight of the Raj, contemporary Bombay, and the Beltway, Mehta writes with a fabulist’s eye and a reporter’s precision, folding real history—a real white tiger’s line, one of whose descendants was gifted to an American president—into an intimate reckoning with memory, silence, and survival. Tender, unflinching, and gorgeously strange, Extinction asks what we inherit, what we bury, and what finally sets us free.”
—Salil Tripathi, journalist and author of The Gujaratis
More Praise
“This is a brilliant book: enigmatic, thoughtful and thought provoking, it appeals to the heart as well as to the mind.”
— Azar Nafisi, author of the international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran (now a motion picture)
“Haunting and exquisitely rendered. An urgent and courageous family epic that is both sweeping and propulsive. Extinction is a powerful family saga about the power of resilience in the face of unspeakable trauma.”
— Joe McGinniss Jr., author of The Delivery Man and other books
“Extinction is as captivating as the white tiger at its center, a novel that moves across generations and continents with piercing intimacy. A deft and wonderful debut.”
— Tania James, author of Loot and other novels
Feel like reading some urban satire?
Tokyo Tour: Around midnight he was awoken by furious knocking. The woman from the reading was yelling outside. “What’s she saying?” he asked. “He’s my boyfriend, I want him back.”