A finalist for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature. A feminist gothic novel that defies literary classifications, blending Indonesian folklore, Islamic mysticism, horror, and political reckoning.What happens when a member of your family commits a “world-shaking evil act”? Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha opens her novel “The Night of a Thousand Hells,” translated by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Cao, with a truly evil act, as Anisa, the youngest of the three sisters, participates in carrying out a terrorist attack that occurred in Indonesia in 2018, which resulted in the deaths of 12 people and the wounding of 40 others, including her two-year-old daughter, who died in that bloody suicide attack.Anisa's older sisters, Mutiara and Maya, find themselves forced to pick up the pieces of what was left behind by the disaster. They face the horrific truths buried in their family's past, and wonder how their sister could have killed her child with her own hands.
The ghost of their younger sister, whose beauty was admired on social media, casts a heavy shadow over their lives. It is difficult to ignore Anisa even after her death, especially since “a series of corpses hang delicately from her ankles as if they were ornaments,” a very dark metaphor that Paramaditha masters.The novel's events move between Indonesia, America, and Australia, dealing with themes of guilt, secrets, betrayal, and sibling rivalry. Last month, the novel was included on the prestigious long list for the 2026 National Book Awards in the translated literature category. Paramaditha, a senior lecturer in media and film studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, succeeds in portraying the characters of the three sisters with great complexity.The sisters grew up under the influence of a racist, domineering and misogynistic father, who imposed his control over his three daughters in an image that evokes King Lear. In the novel, the father is dying in the intensive care unit, without realizing anything about the massacre caused by his favorite daughter.As for older sister Mutiara, a medical worker obsessed with cats and a “religious hijab-wearing bully,” she and Maya, a New York-based writer, have a tense relationship. With Mutiara and Maya forced to confront long-hidden secrets, along with their grandmother's mysterious and ominous prophecies, Paramaditha combines feminism, folklore, Islamic mysticism, and the modern politics of extremism and violence, in a captivating novel that is difficult to confine to one literary form.This bold combination also addresses the treatment of transgender people in the modern world. Among those killed in the attack carried out by Anisa and her husband, Mohammed, were people attending an Islamic seminar for transgender women. “When it comes to people like us, no one cares if we die,” says a family friend, who used to work for them as a maid, sadly about these particular victims.In “The Night of a Thousand Hells,” fate appears to be a cruel game of coincidences, in a novel that paints a bleak and frightening picture of what it means to find oneself “drawn into the abyss” because of the actions of a loved one. “[Evil] ghouls take the most unexpected forms,” Paramaditha writes. “Sometimes they are beautiful or young. Sometimes they even bear your family name.”
