Inventive, melancholy, and unflinchingly courageous.

Siddhartha Deb, author of The Beautiful and the Damned

A tour de force.

Globe and Mail

A poignant and devastating depiction of how silencing fails to annul complicity.

Daphne Marlatt, recipient of the 2012 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award

Just like the noble gas that pervades our universe, extremes of inhumanity pervade the lives of all those touched by them. In Helium, Jaspreet Singh evokes, with striking images and prose that honors W.G. Sebald, Orhan Pamuk, and Primo Levi, the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in India. It is a feat of chemistry, but also of alchemy, for Singh transforms the seemingly ineffable-- the enduring chaos engendered by mob violence -- into a work of fiction both beguiling and lyrical.

Taras Grescoe, author of The Devil's Picnic and Straphanger

An indictment of the terrrible events of November, 1984, the book teases out the complicated intersection of family, love, politics, and hate, and how one man confronts the responsibility and guilt of one of the worst times in his nation's history.

Publishers Weekly

Singh illuminates a horrific event: the systematic genocide of minority Sikhs in November 1984... [A] brutally honest indictment of an often glossed-over episode in India's long history.

Booklist