In 1970, a catastrophic cyclone hit the shores of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), resulting in the deaths of over a half million people. This unimaginable tragedy moors Toronto-based Arif Anwar’s first novel, The Storm.

The Storm covers an almost fifty-year-period, starting in an unnamed village just before the cyclone, and then going back and forth in time from pre-partition Kolkata to the Japanese invasion of Burma during the Second World War to post-9/11 Washington, D.C.

Story by story, Anwar introduces his cast of characters. There is the lettered Honufa, her husband, the illiterate Jamir, and their three-year-old son who must confront the fast-approaching storm; there is Claire, the female British doctor and her patient, the Japanese prisoner-of-war, Ichiro; and Rahim and Zahira, a rich Muslim couple under threat who must choose whether to trade their home in a riot-torn Kolkata for safety by the seaside in what will become Bangladesh.

And finally, there is Shah, a Bangladeshi PhD with nine-year-old daughter, Anna, who lives separately with her mother in Washington, D.C. With his visa set to expire, he has weeks to figure out what will come of his life and how he will stay by his daughter. His accidental meeting with a seemingly kindly immigration lawyer goads him to desperate action.

How all these stories interconnect comes clear as the novel hits its crescendo when the layers of secrets, untold truths and mysteries ultimately reveal themselves. While the novel keeps jumping through time and space, Anwar moves the stories briskly along as each thread hits its own crisis point. However, the narration is occasionally overwhelmed by the accounting of so much time, flattening the emotional intensity in places.

The Storm is a sprawling intergenerational novel, touching on issues of colonialism, migration and communal hatred. It riffs on the differences between destiny, fate and the regrets of decisions made in haste. But Anwar achieves his final goal as the novel eventually pulls at one’s heartstrings as the “vicious cycle of life” becomes evident.

Piali Roy is a Toronto writer.