Night of a Thousand Hells blends the boisterous and the brutal as two women make sense of their younger sibling’s terrorist atrocity
John Self
Saturday 17 October 2026
“This is a tale of three sisters. Isn’t it always?” This winking comment near the beginning of Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha’s second novel is a canny indicator of what to expect: a novel that draws on tradition – a mystery, a family saga, a crime story – but is playful, too.
We might expect such a knowing approach from Paramaditha, whose debut novel The Wandering (translated in 2020 from the 2017 Indonesian original) took the form of a choose-your-own-adventure book, allowing the chapters to be read in a multitude of different sequences; and whose story collection Apple and Knife (2018) recalled the fantastical body horror of Carmen Maria Machado or Mariana Enríquez.
Paramaditha’s new novel, Night of a Thousand Hells, translated vibrantly by her regular collaborator Stephen Epstein alongside Tiffany Tsao, arrives on these shores following its shortlisting in the US for the National book awards in the translated literature category. It’s a buoyant, boisterous and often brutal novel that deserves the acclaim.
It opens in fearless style, as the narrator introduces her “little sister”: “Who knows what darkness lurked in her heart when she strapped on a bomb and blew herself up.” In May 2018, that little sister, Annisa, and her husband carry out suicide attacks in the Indonesian town of Kotawijaya. The town and the bombings are fictional, but likely to have been inspired by real attacks in the same month in the city of Surabaya. In the novel, as in the real bombings, a frisson of horror is added by the husband and wife involving their children in the attacks. Annisa’s daughter was “only two years on this earth and that was that. Mother knows best,” adds the narrator, bitterly.
