Finished One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (advance copy; out Feb. 2).
Nine people--mostly strangers--are in an Indian visa/passport office when an earthquake strikes, trapping them. (The trapped: the office's two workers, a teenage girl and her grandmother, a married couple, a graduate student, an ex-soldier and a Muslim man.) There's debris in the hallway, so they can't get out. To pass the time and stay calm, they start telling stories, sharing one amazing thing from their lives.
You might think that a story set in one room would get boring pretty quickly. (If you do, you obviously haven't seen 12 Angry Men.) This book is anything but boring, though, and part of that is because it really isn't set in one room. Obviously each story takes the reader to a different location. They also manage to distract from the suspense of waiting for rescue.
An amazing book; I look forward to reading her other novels.
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