Asha Thanki presents A Thousand Times Before with V. V. Ganeshananthan

A THOUSAND TIMES BEFORE is rooted in the present by Ayukta, who is the most recent recipient of the tapestry and its beguiling gifts. The novel opens with Ayukta and her wife, Nadya, sitting down to answer a question Ayukta has been avoiding: Should they have a child? It’s something that Ayukta has long struggled with, wondering what it would mean to pass on the legacy of the tapestry—an impossible burden and yet such a remarkable gift.

Ayukta will be the first person to share the secret of the tapestry with someone outside of her bloodline, as she reveals her lineage with Nadya. As she unspools decades of love, loss, heartbreak, and revival, Ayukta reveals the tapestry’s second gift: the ability for each of these women to dramatically reshape their own worlds. Like all power, both fantastic and societal, this inheritance is more treacherous than it seems.

Asha Thanki has crafted a rare, remarkable debut in A THOUSAND TIMES BEFORE. Featuring sublime prose, an achingly beautiful love story, and wholly original world building, this saga of family and motherhood is impossible to put down, or to forget.

Asha Thanki received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Catapult, Hyphen, and more. She is the winner of the 2019 Arkansas International Emerging Writers Prize and fourth prizewinner of Zoetrope’s 2020 Short Fiction Competition. A Kundiman fellow, Asha has received a Randall Kenan Scholarship at Sewanee Writers Conference, Fiction Scholarship with Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature.

V. V. Ganeshananthan is the author of Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers' Workshop. She is a member of the board of directors of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.

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