Aftermath

Taneja’s debut novel, We That Are Young (Knopf), won the Desmond Elliott Prize for the UK’s best debut novel of the year (2018).

Taneja teaches fiction writing in prison, where Usman Khan, the perpetrator of the London Bridge killings, was one of her students. In the attack, Khan killed her friend and program manager Jack Merritt.

Aftermath, her first book of nonfiction, was born out of a sense of horror and loss, as a way to process a personal tragedy and to situate the language of trauma and terror in a broader cultural context.

Arriving on the 20th anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, Aftermath attempts to recapture hope among the lives we think have forfeited the right to be mourned.