Sceptre bags Firdaus’ award-winning debut novel about legacy of partition 

Sceptre has signed A P Firdaus’ debut novel, Remember, Mr Sharma, an early draft of which won the 2021 Bath Novel Award under the title Ghost Time.

In her first acquisition as Sceptre editorial director since joining from Canongate, Jo Dingley acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Julia Silk at Greyhound Literary for publication in July 2023. 

The publisher’s synopsis reads: “Delhi, 1997: It is India’s 50th year of independence, the year of Hindu Nationalists and atomic bombs. But 12-year-old Adi has a bigger problem: his Ma has gone missing—again. Left with an ailing grandmother, a raging father and no answers, he finds an unlikely ally: a talking vulture who reveals himself to be a bureaucrat from the "Department of Historical Adjustment". 

“The department holds Adi’s family files, which he must unlock in order to take a journey through time and memory, through 50 years of India’s history, revealing the darkest secrets of his mother’s past, in a challenge requiring Adi to face his greatest fears.”

Firdaus, who has been writing advertisements by day and fiction by night for more than a decade in Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore and London, said: “After wandering with me for years, like a toddler constantly seeking attention, this novel has grown up and found its way home. A part of me is still surprised by it. All the rest of me is delighted to see it in such stellar company at Sceptre and in the thoughtful care of Jo.”

Dingley said: “This is a heart-soaring story which is as bright and hopeful as it is devastating. Spanning the second half of the 20th century in India, from the first days of partition to the frenetic pace and economic crises of the 1990s, Remember, Mr Sharma explores the ways in which we view the past, its inescapable hold over us and the stories we tell ourselves to create our present. I could not be happier, or more proud, to be publishing this exceptional novel at Sceptre.”

Silk added: “Sometimes a book swoops into your heart and lodges there so firmly it’s hard to remember a time before it was part of your personal canon. Funny and devastating in equal measure, this is a story that must be heard of the legacy of empire and the pain and joy of growing up.”