IT TAKES A MOMENT TO UPEND A LIFE.
As the second wave of the pandemic forces lockdowns across the world, an ambulance driver at a hospital in Delhi finds his days and nights taken over by the task of ferrying patients and bodies-increasingly, bodies-to makeshift crematoria across the city. Up the length and breadth of the city, he meets the grieving and the depraved. A little boy who has lost his mother to the virus, sex workers and hijras holding each other up as the disease tears through their colonies, a young man unhinged by grief over the death of his politician father, a nurse without the time to mourn her own lost love. But also, black marketeers hoarding oxygen and traffickers preying on orphans.
Everywhere, life is hard, but networks of empathy and shared kindnesses build quietly as well, making heroes of ordinary people and shoring up dignities when all seems lost.
Grief Burns Like Fever is elegiac in its evocation of the pandemic years, opening unforgettable pathways to memory and catharsis.

About the Author

MINAKSHI THAKUR writes prose and poetry in English and Hindi. She has published three poetry collections and a novel. Her collection of Hindi poems, Neend ka Akhiri Pul, was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Young Writer's Prize in 2010, while her debut English novel, Lovers Like You and I, was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize. She has also translated Haseena Manzil (forthcoming), a landmark Maithili novel by the late Padma Shri Usha Kiran Khan, into English. Minakshi's day job has taken her from Katha to HarperCollins Publishers India, where she was in charge of its Hindi publishing and translation imprints. Since 2018, she has been leading Ekadā, a vibrant list of translations and original works across English and nine Indian languages.